


Hunger

by WallofIllusion



Category: Fallen London | Echo Bazaar, Soul Eater
Genre: Dubious Consent, F/M, Feast of the Exceptional Rose, Oral Sex, Seeking Mr Eaten's Name
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-21
Updated: 2014-08-21
Packaged: 2018-02-14 01:29:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 7
Words: 27,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2172822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WallofIllusion/pseuds/WallofIllusion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Franken Stein was a Seeker of the Name when he was younger. Now he’s put that behind him, and he serves the Masters of the Bazaar as a Special Constable. But Medusa, a poet who works undermine the Bazaar’s collecting of stories, has her eye on him. She seduces him at the Feast of the Exceptional Rose and reawakens his hunger, and soon it’s all he can do to keep himself from going North…</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> In which I take "Perhaps you're not _hungry_ , exactly..." quite a bit too literally. I'm told that this is easier to understand from the Fallen London side than from the Soul Eater side but I welcome readers of all kinds. Naturally. (:

Finally, the last day of the Feast of the Exceptional Rose has come. The two weeks of frenetic excess have, as always, taken their toll on London, and on the evening of the twenty-ninth the city drags itself about anemically. The fortunate ones have concluded their business and retired to their flats and street-corners to sleep off the revels.

But Special Constable Franken Stein is not to count himself among the fortunate just yet: someone is hosting a ball for the city’s powerful and well-to-do. Who, exactly, is in question: did the Masters of the Bazaar organize it themselves, or were their wares bought with the fat purse and pulled strings that are the purview of the very rich? When someone tried to ask Mr. Pages, he was answered only with encouragement that it would be “one of the most splentifullius events of the year.”

So now, here Stein is at this special ball, masked not in the featureless face-coverings of the ordinary constables stationed at the doors, but in a sumptuous silk number purchased fresh from the Bazaar. He looks out over the crowd and towards the constables on duty. They look as if they’re there to keep people in, which may not be far from the truth. In any case, they cannot be there to break up fights. During the Feast, no interference is allowed in the course of love, whether it run smooth or not.

The attendees mill about, many of them dressed in elaborate suits and gowns that mimic the fashions of the era of London’s fall just over a century ago. Some, however, wear more newfangled garb; a few scandalous women almost cover more skin on their face than they do anywhere else on their bodies. Bohemians, Stein supposes with a quiet roll of his eyes; they’ve been more troublesome of late. What was once a hapless collection of artists and hedonists has recently become a disgruntled batch of counter-culture rabble whom the Special Constables have been instructed to keep a close eye on. Then again, most of the Neath is disgruntled, counter-culture rabble these days. Only a pervasive poverty that covers the city like a poisonous smog keeps them from acting on their displeasure. Poverty, and occasional generous displays of extravagance like the Feast.

Stein doesn’t praise the system, but he knows his place in it. And so he’s at the ball with everyone else who remains untouched by the smog, sipping a wine that claims to be imported from the surface but that still has a fungal edge to it. A few people who have imbibed more fully have already tried to draw Stein into conversation. He has turned them all down; he knows what is going on. Exhaustion aside, the Bazaar’s influence is strong and heady on this last day of the Feast, and it pushes everyone into each other’s arms. The music is hypnotic in rhythm and just low enough to allow easy conversation. There are no breaks between songs; each transitions seamlessly into the next so that one finds oneself dancing to a new melody before realizing the change. Stein does not intend to be taken in. He will finish his wine, he will perhaps stop by the buffet one more time, and then he will find a quiet corner of this mansion to wait out the night.

Just as he’s about to start the second phase of this plan, however, he notices that he’s caught someone’s eye. She is among those who flaunt tradition and comes dressed in modern, rather than Fall-era, fashion, but her dress shows less skin than others’ choices. It is pale green and falls all the way down to her feet in sheer waves. The fabric is thin and clings to her, leaving little to be imagined about the curves of her body. She wears a mask of the same material, and a black shrug to cover her arms. Two long strands of blonde hair are twisted into a half-braid before her chest; the rest is cut short.

When he locks eyes with her, scowling, she only lifts her glass in his direction. She neither looks away nor attempts to approach him. But her gaze is impossible to ignore. So he marches up to her with the sharp gait of the constabulary and offers his hand.

“Will you dance?” he asks in a clipped tone.

She smiles, gracious and a little mocking, and leaves her glass with one of the servers flitting about. “I would be honored.”

One dance only, and then he would dispose of her attentions. As they take to the dance floor, Stein makes careful note of the current melody. Once it changes, he will make excuses and disappear to some other part of the crowd.

She is still smiling as they begin to dance. In a moment, she leans in and says in a private voice, “I know who you are.”

“Oh?” Stein says without interest. The masks are meant to provide anonymity, but in many cases it is a mere affectation. It does not disturb him to be found out.

She takes his hand off his waist and traces the bit of his facial scar that peeks out below his mask with her thumb. It is a remnant of an old folly. “You’re the one they call the scarred constable,” she says, lingering on the words. “One of the Masters’ best and brightest. What an honor, to be invited to a party such as this one.”

“You’re not making much of a secret of yourself, either,” he remarks to the woman in his arms. (Or is he in hers? Somehow, she seems to be the one leading them across the dance floor.) “You’re that snake-keeping poet, aren’t you? Anyone would recognize that hairstyle.” Not to mention that, now that he is closer to her, he sees that her mask and her dress are both covered in an intricate snakeskin pattern.

His dance partner merely smiles.

“I wouldn’t have expected to see you here,” he presses. “Aren’t your lot supposed to be protesting schemes like this?”

The melody has changed, he realizes suddenly. But he wants to hear her answer. There is a small but growing movement of self-indulgers—bohemians and artists, mostly—who object to the Bazaar’s collection of love story. Love should be kept between lovers, they insist; between _humans_. Love simply _is_. The snake-keeping poet, who signs all her poems with the name Medusa, is among their number. She specializes in free verse of the basest sort: erotic, lurid, and vibrant like the scent of the jungle. Her poems fill the senses and are impossible to forget once read. But she ends each of them with the lines “but this is mere fantasy/and I am alone,” spoiling them for the Bazaar. She shouldn’t have been _invited_ to an effort as transparent as this one, let alone interested in attending.

But she only smiles and lifts her hand to guide him into a spin. Yes, she is definitely the one leading, but no matter. “Love is still love,” she says, pulling him a bit more closely into her arms. “It still has its own beauty. Should I let that awful Bazaar ruin my appreciation for it?”

He peers at her, not convinced. Her smile widens unnaturally.

“Besides, the buffet is all-you-can-eat, and I never miss such an opportunity. But you know all about that, don’t you, Mr. Constable?”

His stomach turns and a chill runs down his back. “What?”

But her smile has returned to normal as if she had not spoken.

*

A half-hour later—according to the clock, which Stein suspects runs strangely to confuse the revelers—they are still dancing. Every time Stein notices the song beginning to shift, Medusa pulls him back into conversation or makes some comment about one of her compatriots that could, if only she would continue, serve as evidence against them. Though she never quite reveals enough. Somehow, she has drawn him closer and closer. They are pressed against each other now, and swaying gently in time to the music.

Stein looks down at her with narrowed eyes. “You’re trying to get me into bed.”

She nuzzles her head into his neck. “Good,” she purrs. “It seems that the Masters have at least one clever agent on their hands.”

“Planning to make me into one of your poems?”

“Is that what you think?” she asks innocently.

It isn’t, actually. Something doesn’t seem quite right about that explanation. Nevertheless, he tells her, “You forget my affiliation. I could sell the story of our hypothetical tryst to the Bazaar even if you won’t.”

She pulls back to look him in the eye. Her gaze is serene. “I don’t think there will be any worry of that.”

She does not immediately draw him near again. Instead, she casts her gaze to the side in thought and, in a few moment, speaks. “I know your past, Mr. Constable. I know who you were before you sold your allegiance. So you must understand.” She looks back at him, her eyes searching his. “We cannot let the Bazaar and the Masters rule everything. There are stories and secrets that they have suppressed which deserve to see the light, even such as it is down here. You used to know this. You used to search for them as desperately as anyone down here, driven by pure curiosity. Your curiosity serves you well as a constable, but tell me, is it satisfied now? Does it sate you to hand secrets over to the Masters and see them consumed and lost?”

Stein feels a hollow flame light in his gut—lust. It has to be lust.

She leans in to whisper in his ear. “Be with me tonight,” she pleads. “Be what you once were again.”

He feels her stroke the back of his neck and tug him forward, sees her eyes drop to his lips before slipping shut—and yet her kiss still comes as a surprise. It is gentle when it begins. It is not gentle by the time it ends.

He has to catch his breath when she pulls back to gauge his response. The flame in his belly is burning fiercely now, and he gives a breathy chuckle with a hint of relief in it. It’s only lust. And he can afford to indulge that, once in a while.

Her eyes shine with mischievous triumph when he smiles down at her. She takes him by the hand and leads him off the dance floor.

*

They barely get the door of her lodgings closed before she shoves him up against the wall, her lips crushing his. He arches into her, out of surprise more than desire, and when she presses him bodily back into place he claws at her sides and her hair. He can feel that she is laughing at him, whether silently or through the kiss, but he doesn’t give a damn. It has been too long since he’s done this.

When she breaks the kiss for a moment, he puts a hand on her lips to make her pause. “Why?” he asks breathlessly. Why is this poet, this woman who is either a prolific lover of a liar with a filthy mind, seducing him? She must have some aim in mind.

But she only gazes back at him until he lowers his hand, then gently removes his mask and her own. He sees her eyes clearly for the first time; they are yellow like a devil’s, but the look on her face is all too human. “The why is not important,” she admonishes. She pulls away to slip her shoes off. Instinctively, he copies her. “Come with me.”

She leads him down a dark hall, past a row of cages full of glinting light—the eyes of her rumored snakes, no doubt—and to her boudoir. There, she begins lighting a lamp, and Stein raises his eyebrows. “Do we need light?”

“I think I am worth looking at,” Medusa responds primly. “And I hear _fascinating_ things about you.”

Stein’s body is riddled with scars of his own making. They earned him his nickname among the constabulary, and he supposes it is not surprising that the rumors have spread. As long as the reason for the scars doesn’t spread, he doesn’t mind, but something about the way Medusa said _fascinating_ makes a thrill run through his stomach.

When she finishes with the lamp, she turns her attention back to Stein. She sidles up to him and tugs on his cravat. “May I?” she asks, though she has already managed to loosen it and started on his shirt buttons. He raises a hand to cup her cheek and notices that his fingers are shaking. Perhaps seeing the same thing, she smiles and waits for his next action. But no part of him wants to stop, so he undoes the clasp at her throat and slides her bolero down her arms—only to recoil with a choked cry, his hands smarting.

He looks down at his palms, which sting as if burned, and then back at Medusa, and then he has to avert his eyes again immediately but his mind is already screeching in protest. There are sigils of Correspondence tattooed into her arms. Thoughts that he’d sworn to forget swarm back into his mind. His vision threatens to go red and his knees wobble.

A few steps away, Medusa stands calmly. “I should have mentioned those, perhaps,” she says, faintly smug.

“Witch,” he gasps out, his hands pressed over his eyes as if that will block the sigils out. Instead they bloom against his eyelids.

“That’s one way to put it,” says Medusa’s voice, still unbothered. There is a rustle of fabric, and in a moment Stein feels her hands on his wrists, tugging his hands away from his eyes. He knows he shouldn’t look. He resolves not to look. He will break away from her and run out of the apartment and leave this damned foolishness behind.

His eyes inch open.

She has shed her dress and there are more on her chest and stomach and legs and his mind is thrashing is thrashing is thrashing. She holds his wrists in a steely grip as his eyes water and abortive sounds escape his throat. Before his brain can calm, she has pressed her lips to his again. Her tongue slides into his mouth. There is only one symbol in his mind now and it is the one that means _an ecstasy born of deep dread._

She releases his wrists and returns to the task of removing his clothes. She pushes his jacket down his arms and he lets it fall to the floor as she undoes each of his shirt buttons, still sucking at his lips. Once that, too, has hit the floor, she takes a moment to admire him. She traces the scars across his torso, the one on his shoulder, and Stein has a moment for his thoughts to catch up.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he asks. His voice sounds rusty.

She turns that innocent smile to him again. “I want to remind you,” she answers. “I know you haven’t forgotten what that hunger feels like.”

She sweeps her hand across his abdomen and he jerks in response. His stomach gives a sudden, demanding growl. With trembling lips, he speaks, and he means to say _no_ but the words that come out are: “Do you know it?”

In lieu of answering, she pushes him back into the bed. He struggles to right himself, snarling. He must know. He _must_ know. The tattoos (and scars, some of them are scars) glimmering on her body mock and blind him. They are closer to him suddenly—she has climbed into bed on top of him, straddling his groin. There is a kind of ecstatic anticipation in her face.

“That’s right,” she purrs, rocking her hips lightly against him. Somehow the sensation only feeds his hunger. “You know the question. You know the search. It’s part of you, Stein, no matter how you try to stifle it.”

He tries to think through the hunger that has swallowed him suddenly. He needs too—to—but the only answers are _find the Name_ and _go North_. They are the only possible answers. Medusa is tracing her nails up and down his belly to highlight the empty ache there. The hunger will consume him, he knows it will, he knows because he’s felt it before…

“How long, Stein? How long have you spent pretending you could deny this need?” Her voice is dropping steadily in pitch, and she digs her nails into him. “How long have you neglected to seek out the bargain, pretended not to know the Number, refused the pull of the North? They’re still burning somewhere beneath the water, the candles, and we are still hungering to go North, to know—aagh!”

Her chanting breaks off into a scream when Stein pulls her arm up to his mouth and sinks his teeth into it. He tastes blood. And Medusa is panting, reclaiming herself. She pries her arm out of his mouth and holds it close to her chest. In a moment, she gives a little titter and leans over him, her hands on either side of his head. Her scars and her eyes fill his mind.

“Feeling a little peckish, are we?”

She bends down as if to kiss him but when he strains upwards she pulls away. He whines. She does it a second time and he snaps at her like a rabid dog. In return, she only laughs and grinds her hips against his.

“Let’s be fair,” she murmurs. “I have hungered for far longer than you have. I deserve to have my fill first.”

She kisses him, but only briefly; then she trails her lips down his front, leaving love-bites in a meticulous line. When she swipes her tongue across his stomach, he moans loudly. Every sensation in his body is concentrated in her touch and in the emptiness of his belly. He needs something to fill him, _anything_ —

But she aims to consume him first. He feels her hands undoing his fly and bucks automatically, needing. She does not make him wait. As soon as she has freed him of his pants, her mouth is upon him, lips sliding down his shaft. He gives a shivering moan and bucks again. She presses down on his stomach to still him and continues her work. Taking him deep into her throat each time, she hums like one pleased with her meal. All Stein can do is pant and shudder while she sucks him off. Desire coils around the hunger, twisting and wringing it like a sponge, and he hears himself making noises he’s never made before, not grunts but something more like screeches and deep guttural groans. His brain sears and turns over in his head. He clamps his hands over his mouth to stop the sounds.

When he comes, she drinks of him without hesitation, swallowing and then licking him clean. He lies plastered to the bed, twitching. The sudden dissolution of tension has only made the hunger more intense, and his vision burns red, crowding out the poet, though he feels her fingers trace burning symbols onto his skin. From somewhere far away, he hears her voice asking, “Are you satisfied now, Constable?”

His head swims because he is shaking it back and forth, and groping for her flesh with blind hands. She grasps his hand and presses it onto her skin, onto one of the sigils on her skin and it burns still but this time he does not try to pull away because he wants it on him, in him, wants it to fill him—

“Did you ever learn the Number, Stein?”

He can’t hear her words after that but it’s all right because he doesn’t need to. He remembers. He claws at the sigil under his hand. He will become the Number, he will become more Number than man, he will whittle down his being for the Name and the Name will—

A snarl breaks out of his throat, and he can feel himself trying to catch his breath. He yanks his hand free of Medusa’s grip and pulls it back and almost manages to swing it into her gut before she catches him again. There is still a roar in his stomach, but there is an answering scream in his head now that tells him to hold on. He remembers this, too. It is its own kind of hell, but he clings to it.

She hasn’t released his wrist; he can feel her waiting silently. The red is beginning to clear from his vision, and through the haze, he grins at her and lets out a laugh. It sounds unhinged.

“I know what you’re trying to do,” he says. “It won’t work.”

“It’s already working,” she replies, smooth and confident.

He shakes his head and the bed lurches like a ship at zee. He will hold on. “This used to be everything to me,” he tells her, his stomach growling at the memory. “I was always hungry. No one could do anything to satisfy me. I escaped every restraint they used to try to curb my curiosity.”

“Always northridden,” Medusa says, her teeth flashing in a shark’s grin. She moves over his hips again and he groans; it’s too much, too soon again for him and instead it stings all the way up his spine. He clings to the spark of sanity that remains to him.

“I could have continued back then.” His eyes are rolling in his head but he makes himself meet her gaze. “Do you know what stopped me?”

“Fear,” she hisses out between heavy breaths. Her face is contorted—with malice, with lust.

Stein bares his teeth. “Exactly. I was terrified of what it would do to me. What I would do to myself to know.” _To know!_ He groans, arches, is lost to hunger and pain as she presses the sigils against him, still grinding her hips. Only when he tastes his own blood does he recall who he is. He digs his fingers into her sides for an anchor and forces words through gritted teeth. “That’s why I swore myself to the Masters. I needed them to keep me safe.”

“ _Safe_ ,” she sneers, “or tame? They’re all of them traitors, and they think their sins will be forgotten if only _he_ is—”

The word _traitors_ makes him shudder with horror and rage. He chokes, and his mind rolls inside his skull. “What good would it do?” he asks, his voice far away. It’s half-directed at himself. “To remember him? To doom myself for that?”

For a moment, she is still; but when he cracks an eye open to look at her, she bears down on him once more, her voice low and dangerous. “They would not try so desperately to stop us if there were nothing to be gained. They know we can destroy them, if only we can find the N— _Oh!_ ” She gasps suddenly and bucks, catching her balance on his shoulders. She turns wild eyes on him, her pace growing frantic. “ _More_ , damn you, I need more to fill this emptiness—!”

He moans, consumed by lust, consumed by _her_. His body moves on its own and he sees again the hidden corner in the Forgotten Quarter, the scratched-out name and the hunger that claws at him to know, to _know_ —

With supernatural effort, he wrenches away from her and shoves her off the bed. She snarls in anger and pain when she lands, her face contorted. He keeps his eyes on hers and not on the writing on her body. “Why should I want to overthrow them if there will be nothing left of me in the end?”

Slowly, she regains control over her face, twisting it into a cold sneer instead. “You really think you can escape, don’t you?”

The roar in his stomach says otherwise, but he makes himself heard over it: “I will not throw myself away in that mad search!”

And—silence.

The hunger is not gone, the lust is not gone, but he can think. Medusa watches him for a moment; then she shrugs, stands. She collects his clothing and tosses it at him. She does not put her own dress back on. Every time her scars catch his eye, his stomach gives an empty rumble.

When he is dressed, he takes one last look at her. A mistake. She is composed once more. She lies on her side, like a painting of a goddess, and her body and her tattoos threaten to plunge him back into the darkness. By the smile on her face, she knows it.

“Will I see you again, Mr. Special Constable?”

His lip curls. “I’ll see you behind bars.”

Her laughter follows him as he lurches away under the glowing eyes of her snakes. Outside, the lamps have been extinguished. He can only hope that he is headed home, not to the Royal Bethlehem and not, for the love of god, to the North.


	2. Chapter 2

As always, the Special Constables are called to a meeting first thing in the morning the day after the Feast. But Constable Marie Mjolnir is newly promoted and so she completely forgets this until Spirit Albarn, another member of the force, pounds on the door of her apartment shortly before they’re due to the Bazaar. With a groan, she gets out of bed and dressed as quickly as possible.

“Thank you,” she says grudgingly as she joins Spirit on the walk to the Bazaar. But then she looks around them. “Where’s Stein?”

To her surprise, he answers with a huge grin. “Still asleep,” he says. “Got in _late_ last night, if you know what I mean.”

Her cheeks redden. “Oh, d-did he.”

“Yep. I thought I’d let him sleep in, all things considered.” He launches into an ornate description of the woman Stein went home with, and Marie tunes him out. She doesn’t want to know. Fortunately, they make it to the Bazaar before Spirit can start making guesses at the woman’s measurements, and soon two Masters sweep into the room. Mr Pages, the official head of the Special Constables, is quick to call the meeting to order.

“Most servacious ones! We have had another splentabulous feast, thanks to your assistance. Our compantriot Mr Wines will assist in the record-keeping, so please, serve him as dilistiffly as you would us. Mr Wines, if we may offer, Constable Azusa would be most persinent for the organization of the information you desire.”

Wines inclines its head, and Pages retreats to a corner of the room and sits. Marie tries to give Wines her full attention as it begins to request data from her various companions, but her mind keeps wandering. She wouldn’t have expected Stein to fall prey to the wiles of the Bazaar. Marie herself is always looking for a husband (though she knows better than to look at the Feast, and traded in a number of favors to stay away from last night’s ball), but whenever she mentions that around Stein, he only rolls his eyes benevolently. He collects stories of romance and adoration; he doesn’t appear in them. Except apparently he did, last night.

Precisely as she admits that this conclusion is inevitable, he slips into the room and takes his place next to her. Spirit sends him an exaggerated wink-and-grin routine, which Stein seems to deliberately ignore. Marie frowns; is there something more here than a simple affair?

“Constable Mjolnir!”

Marie snaps to attention at the sound of Yumi Azusa’s voice. Azusa is one of the strictest and most loyal Special Constables, sometimes called by their peers “Queen Stick-up-her-arse.” She’s one of Marie’s friends, but right now, she doesn’t look too friendly.

“What are the numbers from the Royal Bethlehem?”

“Oh! Yes!” She takes out the envelope that she grabbed from the morning’s post on her way out the door. “47 were admitted last night, for a total of 103 over the course of the feast.”

Wines inclines its head again. “We will cover their expenses. _Only_ the expenses of those incapacitated by the feast. See that that is made clear to the Manager.”

Marie winces. A few years ago, someone miscommunicated to the Manager of the Royal Bethlehem just how much the Bazaar would pay. The Manager charged them for every single one of his current guests, and the poor go-between hasn’t been seen since. Marie hopes he’s just safely exiled to the tomb-colonies. In any case, a repeat of that disaster is not likely. Azusa sharply sends one of the younger constables, Justin Law, with the message, and Marie finds her mind wandering again as she watches Stein.

He doesn’t seem very focused, either.

*

When the meeting concludes, Spirit rounds on his roommate immediately. “Sooo. Seems like _you_ found someone you like last night.”

Stein starts as if pulling himself out of thought. He blinks at Spirit. “That’s one way to put it.”

“How’d it go?”

Marie sends Spirit a sharp glare. “That’s not any of your business!”

“Oh, come on. You can’t fault me for being curious. I mean, the only way I could’ve been more surprised is if _Azusa_ had found a date ouch—”

Azusa strides between them, deliberately stepping on Spirit’s foot without a glance at him. Stein gives a little chuckle in response, and at that simple action some of Marie’s worry is relieved.

“Did you enjoy the Feast overall?” she asks Stein, her question deliberately broad.

“The… Feast? Oh. I suppose so. Quite a successful year.”

Marie’s worry swells again. “Are you all right?”

“Yes. Just slept poorly.” His stomach growls, and for a moment he looks petrified with fear, but it passes. “And I haven’t had breakfast yet.”

Neither have Marie and Spirit, so they decide to have breakfast together before they get to work collecting the products of the Feast. Stein turns down a suggestion of the Singing Mandrake with surprising force and votes for a dingy little place on Ladybones Road instead. Even then, he sends furtive looks about them as they sit. By now, even Spirit has noticed that something’s wrong.

“Hey, Stein?”

“Food first,” the scarred constable answers, glancing over the menu quickly and then summoning the waiter with a raised hand. He orders three full breakfasts and then turns to Spirit and Marie.

Marie blinks. “I need a few minutes yet.” She hasn’t even had a chance to open the menu. Spirit nods his agreement.

“Fine,” Stein says. “But bring mine out, please.”

As the waiter scurries away, Marie and Spirit don’t look at their menus. They look at each other, and then at Stein, who is rattling his fingers against the table. Spirit speaks first.

“Hungry, Stein?”

He nearly jumps out of his chair. “I—no, no. No more so than usual.” He looks from one face to the other and sees that they’re not convinced. “I didn’t eat much at the Feast,” he tries again.

“Right, okay.” Spirit crosses his arms. “Sure.”

He’s still suspicious, and not afraid to show it. He watches Stein with a narrow stare, and Stein glares back. Not knowing what else to do, Marie glances down at her menu to look for the meals Stein ordered. “Stein, would you recommend the sausages?”

“I don’t kn—I don’t care,” he says. He looks over at her as if he resents the question. “Get whatever the hell you want.”

Spirit scowls. “Hey—”

“Spirit,” Marie interrupts placidly. She turns her gentle eye towards the redhead. “Don’t worry about it.”

Now Spirit is resentful, too, looking at her incredulously. She only gazes back, and hopes that he can read what she understands in her expression. She can see, as clear as moonish light, that something has got its hooks into Stein. The hunger is a sign. Everyone in the Neath knows to beware of it. But Marie knows better than most that lecturing and criticism will not bring Stein back.

“Spirit? Can you get breakfast somewhere else?”

And he can’t deny that she knows obsession better than he does, so he dons his black cap once more, salutes them both with more formality than is necessary, and strides off. The waiter comes ’round again and Marie orders the first meal her eye falls on. Stein is silent, fidgeting as he waits for his food.

In a moment, Marie asks, “Does it have to do with the woman you saw last night?”

He is silent, crossing his arms.

Marie sighs. When she’d first come to the Neath, she’d blustered around the city with nothing but anger and a sense of justice driving her. Her brother was dead and, determined to have her revenge, she’d responded to anyone who tried to talk sense into her much as Stein was responding now.

But he’s the one who spoke to her, after she woke up from her first death and realized that she was trapped in the Neath. That was the first time she’d let herself feel the fear and doubt that had already been plaguing her. He’d offered her an alternative to recklessness, and somehow Marie had seen herself reflected in his eyes. She let him guide her onto the straight and narrow. Only later did she learn of the cursed hunger that was endemic to the Neath and the mad search that came with it. Only later did she learn that Stein knew obsession as well as she did.

She swallows. It hurts to do so. “Stein,” she says, “what would you do if I ran off in search of revenge again?”

His face twists in a sneer. “Do you think this is that simple?”

“Explain it to me, if it isn’t,” she says.

“Do you think I’m some kind of idiot?!” he bursts out, half-rising from his chair. Marie presses her lips together and only stares back.

“What are you thinking,” she asks, her voice perfectly level.

“I’m thinking that that _bitch_ is trying to ruin me and you and Spirit are acting like you think she’s already succeeded!” he snarls. “If her intention is so obvious that you can read it on me without even meeting her, do you think I’m unaware? Do you think I’m stupid enough to fall for it?” He clutches the edge of the table until his knuckles are even whiter than his pale skin. “I am only hungry. The hunger is not enough to damn me.”

Marie gazes back until Stein realizes that she is not angry, that she is not going to attack. He collapses back into his chair. The waiter comes by with his food and he digs in without another word. Marie’s eggs arrive before he is finished eating, and she begins to eat at a somewhat slower pace. He will not speak until he is out of food, he senses, so she takes the time to organize her thoughts.

The mad hunger is upon him. The woman from the feast built it up in him, deliberately, and he knows and is trying to fight it. Then perhaps Marie’s input is unnecessary. Stein is smart, and not inexperienced in this matter. What can she even offer him?

Two of Stein’s plates are clean, and he pauses before he starts on the third. He closes his eyes and gives a sigh. “Forgive my temper,” he says in a low voice.

“Already did.” It’s a bit too chipper, but she doesn’t want to be solemn.

“I know what I’m doing,” he says. “I know how to handle this.”

“Who was she?”

He swallows. “One of the Lovelorns,” he answers. “Medusa. The snake-keeping poet.”

Marie narrows her eye in confusion. “Why her?” She knows of the Lovelorns only marginally, but their goal she understands well enough. It’s a bizarre choice for a special constable.

He gives a miserable shrug and begins to pick at his third plate. “What would you have done, in a place like that with love thick in the air, if someone had played to your foolishness? If he’d hinted at your brother just enough that you know what he meant but could convince yourself that you didn’t?” He shudders. “I fell for her just the way she meant me to.”

Marie carefully lifts a forkful of eggs to her mouth. She isn’t sure whether she dares to voice the question on the tip of her tongue, or if she even wants to know the answer—but she can’t quite manage to swallow it.

“Are you going to see her again?”

“No.” He shakes his head compulsively, wildly. “No, and I’ll arrest her if I do. I told her so when—when I left her. She’ll know better than to come back for me.”

Marie isn’t so sure. She’s heard what kind of things Seekers get up to. “If you see her, tell me, all right?”

“Yeah, okay.”

He doesn’t look at her there. She presses, “I don’t want anything to happen to you. I know you don’t need my protection, but you have it, all right? I know what this feels like.”

“All right.”

He pays for breakfast and tries to smile as they part to hunt down the love stories produced during the Feast. Marie tries to smile back. But she feels a bit of her old obsession stirring in the back of her mind simply from its brief mention. For Stein, it must be worse.

She thinks she hears his stomach growl as he turns towards Veilgarden.

*

Stein walks away from breakfast starving. He’d eaten a total of six eggs, eight slices of sausage, and at least two whole mashed potatoes, and washed it all down with three mugs of coffee, and he is still starving. No matter what he has for lunch, he’ll be starving after that, too. And dinner. He remembers this.

As his stomach growls, he sighs and engages in a brutal mental fantasy of shoving that damn poet’s face into the cobblestones. _That_ is what he’ll do if he sees her again, long before he calls for Marie and her overbearing help. And then he’ll arrest her like he’d promised her he would, after he’d pulled away from her grasp and from the poison she’d slipped into his mind.

When he’d finally managed to stumble into bed, he had dreamt of her. Dreamt of _consuming_ her, his face between her legs and gulping in her scent or his teeth around her thighs, her sides. Of biting off the sigils she has made part of herself and swallowing them and making them part of her instead. They float before his eyes now, and he shudders and his knees weaken. He glances behind him superstitiously. Good, Marie has headed in the opposite direction. She’s not here to see him shake. Not here to ask him what’s on his mind. There’s no way he’s telling her _that_.

His legs are carrying him to Veilgarden. It only makes sense. The special constables have stories to collect. Nominally, they are censoring the vile and perverted personal tales that people spread after the Feast. No one believes this anymore. It’s common enough knowledge that they are collecting stories for the Bazaar. It’s done in uniform, and a number of the desperate and destitute are known to approach constables in the middle of the day to try to sell their romantic tales.

Stein’s not sure he should be engaging in such sales right now, but duty calls.

Veilgarden, den of poets and other artistic riffraff, is undoubtedly one of the best places to find such stories. The bookshops and smoke shops along its streets are already displaying crudely-bound tracts. As Stein strides down the street, trying to discern whether the hunger is more noticeable if he walks quickly or slowly, shopkeepers call out to him and hawk their scandalously personal wares. One begins to read out of the ’zine in her hand, and Stein has to quicken his pace.

He is not looking for this shoddy work; the other Special Constables will be around for it soon enough. But the Lovelorns are professionals, in their own way. It’s suspected that they have a private printing press. In any case, they list no publisher, but their journals—slim volumes, never more than twenty pages—are of undeniable quality. It has been Stein’s task to keep an eye on them, and his… investigation has taught him that much.

And a little more. He thinks of Medusa’s poetry, and with a flash and an echo it occurs to him that she has always spoken of lust as a hunger. Of consuming her lovers. He had never thought it literal—or had he, and that was what was drawn him to her writing?

He hadn’t recognized the feeling as something personal, something with a particular object. The Lovelorns are hardly the only writers in the Neath to lace their writing with the erotic, and it’s all good enough for the occasional wank. He’d thought Medusa’s was the same. Nothing more. If he came back to her poems again and again, if they stayed in his mind better than any other, he had thought, it was only because she wrote more vividly than the norm.

With a sinking feeling, he realizes that he’s been lying to himself for quite some time now.

Just beyond the Singing Mandrake is a tiny independent bookstore. The storekeeper recognizes him before he doffs his cap. “Here for the latest?”

“If you would.”

The storekeeper reaches into the box behind him and hands Stein a thin volume bound in black leather. On the spine is the date. On the back of the volume, stamped in gold near the bottom, is simply the word “Lovelorns.”

“Useless as ever, that is,” the storekeeper says knowledgeably. “I mean for what you want it for. Me, I think I can get some use out of it.”

But Stein isn’t paying attention; with trembling fingers, he’s flipped it open to scan the table of contents.

Medusa isn’t there.

Even if she had been, her contribution wouldn’t have been about him just yet—even if she can write poetry that quickly, this volume must have been printed well before last night. But her absence frustrates and insults and horrifies him all at once. He should feel relieved, perhaps, but he doesn’t feel that at all.

“How much?” he asks.

“Forty echoes.”

Stein swallows a sigh. The prices are always exorbitant for a few weeks after the Feast. He wonders if the Lovelorns are complicit in the price-gouging—it seems like something they’d do, useless to the Bazaar though their writing might be—or if it’s just the storekeeper’s doing. In any case, he pays and gets a receipt for the purchase. The Masters will reimburse him, when he turns this in and makes his usual report.

What he should really be concerned about is the next volume. If she writes about him then, if she makes him turn _that_ in to the Masters—a shudder wrenches through his spine. He wonders what they will do to him. The search is forbidden. It’s allowed to continue out of their sight, if only because they can’t stop it, but if it is pointed out to them directly…

He shudders again as he leaves the bookstore. He must find the poet and bring her down before she can ruin him.

*

Spirit stares at the dish in Marie’s hands. It’s heaping with a potato-tuna casserole.

“I don’t like cave-tuna.”

“It isn’t for you,” she answers. “It’s for Stein.”

Spirit raises his eyebrows. “That whole thing is for Stein?”

“Sure is.” Marie pushes her way past him and into the apartment that he and Stein share so that she can put the hot dish down. She made it as soon as she got back home; she had barely been able to focus on the magazines and tabloids she’d been sent out to collect. Stein had been on her mind.

“Where is he?”

She looks back at Spirit, who’s leaning on the kitchen’s door frame. He shrugs. “Dunno. We were supposed to be looking over the playbills at Mahogany Hall, but he never showed.”

Marie’s brow furrows. “I think I saw him heading for Veilgarden after breakfast.”

“Isn’t Veilgarden exactly where he _didn’t_ want to go?”

Marie remembers the way Stein flinched when she recommended the Singing Mandrake. “Yeah…”

Spirit sidles into the room and pulls the aluminum foil back from the casserole to fish out a hunk of potato. He pops it into his mouth and makes a face. “I hate tuna.”

“It _isn’t_ for you.” She bats the foil back into place. “I made it for Stein. _You_ can feed yourself.”

Spirit rolls his eyes. “I bet he couldn’t wait to come all the way home and make dinner, so he’s eating out.”

Marie is silent.

With a bitter laugh, Spirit adds, “And he’ll still be hungry when he gets back even if that _is_ what he’s doing.” He looks at Marie sharply. “What did you two talk about?”

“It’s private,” Marie answers. But she sees worry in Spirit’s eyes, behind all the crossness and posturing. He has been Stein’s friend for years, since before he got free of this the first time. So she tells him, “Obsession.”

Spirit gives a heavy sigh and sits down at the kitchen table. He drums his fingers on the tabletop idly, looking out the grimy window. Finally, he turns back to Marie. “Is it bad?”

“I don’t know,” she says honestly. “You’ve seen him like this before. You would know better than I would.”

“It’s been a long time.” He runs his hand through his hair. “Almost ten years. Why’s it back now? Did he say?”

“He did.” Marie doesn’t elaborate.

“Was it the woman from last night?”

“Ask him, if you want to know.”

“He’s not going to answer me,” Spirit says in exasperation. “He’s never talked to me about any of this. He just snaps at me or makes these vague threats.”

“Spirit—”

Stein has come home, and is standing in the doorway of the kitchen, but Spirit hasn’t noticed. With a raised eyebrow and a dark look, Stein warns her not to interrupt Spirit.

“Or when it’s _really_ bad, he starts talking about drowning and betrayal and retribution and you should _see_ his face when he gets like that. He doesn’t even look human.”

“Spirit!”

Marie has to cut him off there, because Stein has closed his eyes and gritted his teeth. He’s holding onto the door frame as if it’s the only thing that keeps him from collapsing. Spirit looks behind him at last, and scattered red blotches appear on his face as if he can’t decide whether to flush or to pale.

In a small voice, Marie says, “I made you some dinner.”

“I already ate.” Stein’s eyes are still closed, and his chest moves steadily with deep breath after deep breath.

“That’s fine. You can leave it for later.”

“No, I’ll have it now.”

He moves into the kitchen and looms over Spirit. “I want to sit.”

Spirit scowls. “There’s another chair.”

“I want to sit in _that_ one.”

Spirit hesitates a little more; then he stands so rapidly that the chair tips backwards. He doesn’t right it, only glares at Stein. “You’re being an ass.”

With a toothy smile, Stein picks up the fallen chair, pushes the second chair out of its current spot with his hip, and sets the chair there. He sits and pulls the casserole towards himself.

“Fork?”

“Get it yourself, bastard,” Spirit says, and storms out.

The smile disappears from Stein’s face once Spirit is gone; he stares down into the casserole with an unreadable expression. Once again, Marie can see the concentration he puts into each breath. She checks the drawer by the sink. There are forks there.

“Thank you,” he says when she hands him one.

She doesn’t answer. She just stares at him, still standing. He digs into the casserole with the gusto of a man who hasn’t eaten for days.

“What do you think?” he asks through a mouthful of food. A fleck of limp tuna flies out of his mouth and he retrieves it with the tip of his finger. “Do I seem inhuman?”

_Currently, yes._ Marie doesn’t say it.

But Stein can interpret her silence—he’s a constable, they’re paid for skills like that—and he gives a bark of laughter. “Just wait,” he says. “You haven’t seen anything yet.”

“Am I going to see more?”

The question seems to give him pause. She sees the fork in his hand tremble. “I hope not,” he says quietly.

“Spirit says you were supposed to be at Mahogany Hall today.”

Stein waves his hand dismissively. “They won’t have products from the Feast up for a week at least. Plays take time to put together.”

“So you went to Veilgarden instead?”

He frowns up at her. “How do you know that?”

“I watched you go,” she answers. “You went in that direction after breakfast.”

He closes his eyes as if trying to remember. “Breakfast was so long ago. I’ve eaten five times since then. Full meals.”

Somehow, it seems more concrete coming from his mouth. Marie’s heart pounds uncomfortably, but she tries to smile. “You’re going to get fat,” she jokes.

“I’m not. We d—” He flinches, tries again. “Seekers don’t—”

He is trembling. Marie swallows. “Stein, don’t worry about it. It was just a joke.”

“This hunger doesn’t make people fat,” he says loudly, defiantly. She doesn’t know who he’s defying. “It just makes you empty and hungry but no one ever puts on weight from it. I know because it’s happened to me before and I will not let it happen to me again!”

He slams the palm of his hand on the table and glares at Marie.

In a more controlled voice, he says, “I do not need the Name.”

She shakes her head slightly.

“Nothing can make me search for it.”

Shakes her head again.

“But you and Spirit can’t do anything to stop me, either.” He drops the fork into the half-empty dish. “So just back off already.”

And with that, he storms out of the kitchen, leaving Marie to show herself out.

*

He finds her not in Veilgarden’s crowds but in Spite’s grimy alleyways. It’s mere coincidence; he recognizes her from behind and grabs her shoulder. The hunger in his stomach is unbearable when she smiles, showing all her teeth in a monstrous grin.

“Been looking for me?”

He slams her against the side of the building and holds her there with one arm, readying his handcuffs with the other. But he realizes, when he gets the cuffs around her wrists, that she is not so much struggling in pain as she is arching back into him. He grasps her hair and turns her face towards him; she is smiling, and her eyes are half-closed and possessed.

“Is this how it was?” she wonders, and the context of the question snaps onto his mind like a marsh-wolf trap. _When they betrayed him, when they chained him, when the realization came to him that he was finished_ —He slams her against the wall again but it doesn’t stop the thoughts and a bruised cheekbone doesn’t stop her from talking in the same distant voice:

“What will you take from me, Stein? It doesn’t matter, in the end. Everything was taken from him, and if everything is taken from me, too, then I will only be one step closer to the Name…!”

She twists in his arms to face him, and her eyes seem to swallow him up. They aren’t her eyes. They’re the eyes of something older, something even more dangerous. Her voice is deep and hoarse. “You will be betrayed, you will lose everything. You will welcome these chains so that you may know!”

He tries to strike her again, but now he is the one in the handcuffs, the one in seven heavy chains. He is on his knees, and she is standing over him, cupping his chin in a delicate hand. For a moment, the hunger is stilled and this feels right. This is how it was. Betrayal and chains and anger and _anger_ and _ANGER—_

He struggles to his feet though the chains weigh him down and the hunger is worse than it’s ever been. Her smile and the knowing (knowing!) tilt of her head do not change. Her grip on his chin tightens and she rams her free hand into his stomach. He groans, not with pain, but with the depth of his emptiness. He needs to know. He needs to know, and she knows, so he needs— _her._ Needs to devour her, to consume her, to take her and her knowledge into himself and be full with her. She presses herself against him and on her lips on her tongue he thinks he can taste what she knows like a spice he can’t quite place. They are not clothed now though god knows how she stripped him when the chains are still in place, and she is pulling him down to the ground and down beyond that and down, infinitely down into the darkness, the water, the consummation of the hunger where emptiness roars in his ears like an old friend.

*

He wakes, ravenous, sticky with sweat. The lamps outside are not lit. According to the clock beside him, they will not be lit for hours.

He needs to shower, and he needs to eat something, and he needs to get this damned woman off his mind. He doesn’t have the focus for any of it. His brain keeps flitting from the hunger to her (her knowledge and the feel of her skin) to a song he used to sing with his friends as a child. He was the only one whose tongue had burned with the words.

_Down and down and North and round, stolen for a city…_

He’d hungered even then, even in his youth. Hungered in a way his playmates hadn’t. It was a traditional song but singing it felt like standing at the edge of a cliff and daring the wind to come push you off. Tempting in a teenage, adrenaline-rush sort of way, but that was all it was to the rest of them.

Stein hadn’t waited for the wind. Stein had jumped.

And not off a cliff but into a well. When they retrieved him, the last time, his parents told him that he’d been delirious, singing _Gone and done and gone for good, putting out the candles…_

When he’d healed, his parents sent him to London: away from the wells, and into the domain of the benevolently terrifying Masters. Not quite away from the hunger, but by harnessing fear and duty, he’d tamed that, too. Learned to live with it. Learned not to let it rule him.

Stein sits up, only to curl in on himself. He can fight this. He’s fought it before, forced it down before, and gone on with his life. He’s been hungry, but he can deal with that. He can break free of the search again. Nothing has changed, nothing save the presence of this woman and she is attractive and nothing more than that. She plays at knowing exactly the right buttons to push, but he still knows himself better than she does and he can resist.

He does need that shower, though. With any luck, that will help him feel more like himself or at least clear away the nightmare, the feeling of drowning like he did and the anger and the patient burning instinct for revenge and the need the need the _need_ for the Name—

With a cry, Stein throws the covers back and lurches out of bed. He doesn’t need a shower. He needs food.


	3. Chapter 3

For love.

Of course, for love. Isn’t that always the right answer around here?

In the darkness, in the reflection that isn’t _her_ reflection, the woman’s face shifts. “Love, eh? Never did figure out whether that whole mess was worth it, m’self. But think a’ this: would your sweetheart, whoever it is, want you to throw yourself away like this?”

Memories, then: candle-wax dripped onto her bare skin to leave burns that curl in strange ways, and private banquets that somehow always ended with blood in their mouths, and terrifying reassuring whispers that she couldn’t give up, mustn’t give up. One final memory: his face frozen in rigor mortis with a fiery look of triumph preserved in his eyes when she found him too late.

“For love,” she says again, certain of her answer.

*

She wakes, clutching a candle. The second of seven. She is making fast progress, faster than she has in decades. It was only a few weeks ago that she betrayed her last victim—the constable, the one who thought he’d escaped—and pulled back her own skin for the first. In the back of her mind, a quiet voice pleads to slow down, to stop. But in her drowning dreams, she has devoured scabs and reopened wounds and left new bite marks up and down her arm. She is starving. She cannot escape.

She puts the new candle in the drawer with the first and locks it up again. On her way to the kitchen, she pulls covers over the mirrors absently. She’ll need to be careful for now—just for now. She’ll win their trust back soon enough, but for now, caution.

Breakfast is panther-steak—raw, straight from the icebox. The juices pool beneath her tongue and try to escape down her chin, but she catches every drop with her fingers and then sucks them clean. Because it’s raw, it is enough for now. Soon she can think clearly again, and she thinks to check the mail slot.

She finds what she expects: a letter in a half-recognized hand, expelling her from the Lovelorns. It gives no explanation as to _why_. Do they even understand their sudden animosity towards her? Or does the bile rise in their throats for no real reason? Either way, she can hardly blame them for tossing her aside. Lately, she hasn’t been able to keep her mind off the search, and she hears it’s the same for other Seekers.

_’E’s been restless lately, what with the city dying and the Bazaar gettin’ desperate_ , the woman in the mirror had warned her. _F’you have any sense in your bloomin’ ’ead, you’ll get out of the way._

But it’s too late for that. Medusa made her vow years ago—almost a century now. The man she loved swore her to the search and then was consumed by it. And she is not subject to the vagaries of death as he was, not since the Marvellous. So when she sees him in dreams, when their heavy chains twist together and his voice in her ear says he misses her, she has nothing to fear.

For his memory’s sake, she has taken care of those she has damned. And as such, she supposes that most of them will have forgotten her or come to despise her like her poet friends, like the wary eyes behind the mirrors. She was too diligent in ensnaring them. But the constable—she has not had time to turn that into an alliance, a friendship. He hated her as they’d danced, as they’d fucked, as he’d stormed out of her home. There is no reason that the web she has begun to weave about him should have dissolved. He will remember her.

And so, she has a poem to write.

*

Two weeks pass. Another volume of the Lovelorns’ poetry comes out, but Medusa is not in this one, either. But her absence only gnaws on his mind like a dog’s teeth grating against a bone. He cannot forget her.

And so: the Parlour of Virtue.

Its location in Veilgarden is no secret; it isn’t even on a back alley. Rather, it’s on the corner of one of the main streets. And even if it were not, Stein would have known its location. He has been there before, to offer protection to its fine employees and once to pick up Spirit after a little too much to drink. He’s never before gone there for his own… edification.

But he has to get this woman off his mind somehow.

So after his (third) dinner, he changes into civilian clothes and pulls the brim of his cap down low. Spirit catches him on the way out.

“Where are you going?”

“Parlour of Virtue,” he answers. It’s worth it partially because Spirit’s eyes look like they’re about to pop out of his head; and besides, he knows that Spirit won’t tell. In this matter alone, Spirit understands the need for discretion.

He does seem to want details for his own sake, though. “You? The Parlour? _Why_?”

“I need a distraction.”

Stein narrows his eyes in thought. In a moment, he nods his head approvingly. “If you want a really good time, ask for Jenny and tell ’em I sent you.”

Stein gives a sort of nod and pulls his hat down a little lower before heading out the door. He’s not going to ask for Sinning Jenny, and he’s not going to give Spirit’s name. The point is to get this taken care of _without_ being recognized. He’s crossed paths with Jenny before, and she seems to know everyone. In all senses of the word.

He is starving again by the time he arrives, but he doesn’t let that cripple his gait. There’s a bell above the door that tinkles merrily as he enters. The woman at the front desk looks up.

“You’re an early one.”

She’s leaning back in her chair with her legs, slender and lasciviously clad in the scarlet stockings of Mr Wines’ chosen women, propped up on the desk. There’s a bowl of fruit just behind her.

“Who can I get for you? Anyone in particular?” She drops her legs and leans forward over the desk so that her cleavage is amply displayed. “Or if you don’t know, just tell ol’ Lissy your preferences and she can get you hooked up with someone nice.”

The fruit is probably plastic. Almost definitely plastic. But Stein can’t take his eyes off it. —She’s said something, the woman in the stockings. “Sorry, what?” he asks, shaking his head. He still can’t look away. His stomach growls.

The woman looks from him to the bowl of fruit behind her and then back again. “ _Oh_. You know, I think I know just who you need.” She turns to holler down one of her hallways. “Blair! Friend of yours!

“She’ll help you out, love.” Lissy nods knowingly.

“Thank you,” he says on autopilot. “Sorry, could I have a piece of that?”

“It’s plastic, love.”

“Right, of course.” He takes a deep breath and tries to gather himself. Fortunately, the woman who was called for comes out before he can decide that he wants a bite of the fruit, plastic or not. He frowns in confusion. Lissy had called her a friend, but he doesn’t know her.

Still, when she waves him forward from the dim hallway, he follows her. Her hair is black, so deep a black that it’s almost violet, and she moves with a lifeless pace down the hall.

“Name?” she asks, her voice drifting over her shoulder.

He jumps. “N—no, I just wanted to…”

“I mean _your_ name.”

He flushes. His name. Of course. Er—

“Do you always ask that of your… clients?”

She shrugs. “I always ask. They don’t always answer.” There’s something strange about her voice, something flat and dead. “Is yours a secret?”

The Parlour of Virtue is legal, but still scandalous. He’d rather not be associated with the place. “For now, at least.”

“All right.” And then she pauses, and gives a distant giggle. “A secret name.”

A chill goes down Stein’s spine and he feels the walls of the hallway press in on him. Something is wrong. But before he can figure out what, Blair opens her door with a key hanging from her wrist, and Stein stops dead in the doorway.

Every visible surface of the room is covered in food. Even the bed is scattered with cheap bags of snacks, some of them open and spilling their contents across the bedspread. Along the far wall, where one might expect to see a window in any other location, is a shelf lined with alternating bottles of Greyfields and laudanum.

As his stomach growls noticeably, she guides him into the room with an arm around his waist. “Would you like something? You look hungry.”

He doesn’t have it in him to refuse. He grabs whatever’s closest—it’s a hunk of cheese—and begins to tear into it. As he eats, Blair walks past him and sits down on the bed.

“You’re welcome,” she says in the same dead voice as before.

With a bite of cheese still in his mouth, Stein pauses and looks at her more closely. She stares back with no expression in her face, with no light in her eyes. His stomach turns. She’s one of the soulless. They’re almost a fifth of the population now but he still isn’t used to seeing them, interacting with them. And the gash on her stomach, beneath the hem of her cropped shirt—the sheer amount of food in this room—

He takes a step backwards, but she’s closed the door behind him. And she’s standing again; something warm and thin gleams in her hand. She winds one arm around his waist.

“I can help you,” she says, her voice almost earnest. “The cat ran off with mine, but I can get you started. He’ll come back. Lots of food here.”

He shakes his head, tries to stammer some kind of protest. The words don’t come out right and they’re drowned out by another growl from his stomach.

“Are you nervous?” Her face is impossibly close to his. “I can help you relax a little first, if that’s what you need.”

And then she’s kissing him, rubbing her body against his. She moans, as if in pleasure, but there’s something mechanical about all of it, and when she reaches down and squeezes his groin he pushes her backwards. His breath is caught in his throat, and he watches the hand with the spirifer’s fork carefully.

“I-I’m not here for what you’re thinking of,” he says, his voice trembling. “I just came for distraction.”

A slow, puzzled blink. “Distraction.”

“ _Just_ distraction,” he reiterates.

She stares emptily at him for a moment longer, then sets the fork aside. “Then shall we get to distracting?”

She pulls her shirt smoothly over her head, but rather than watch, Stein says, “Hang on. Let me finish this first.” His stomach is twisting with fear, but he still has a handful of cheese left. And there was some bread over there, and dark cherries that made his mouth water just looking at them—

*

She ejects him from the room a short time later after extracting enough money to cover what he’s consumed. “I’m hungry too, you know,” she says. Her words should have been reproachful but they’re as flat as all the rest. “And I have other clients to deal with.”

He finds himself staring at her closed door with some bafflement. He’d paid, hadn’t he? And he would keep paying if she wants him to, for all the food—but it occurs to him then that he hadn’t come here for food, and he hadn’t done what he’d come for, and anyway if she is as hungry as he is then he shouldn’t be looking for distraction from her anyway. To say nothing of the spirifer’s fork.

He straightens his coat—she made an attempt to dishevel that, at least—which he had barely noticed—and walks out on shaking legs, nodding to the woman at the desk as he goes. He’s still hungry. And he’s thinking of the poet, thinking that she wouldn’t have let him deny her, would have ripped him away from the food so that he stayed hungry and stolen his attention for her own…

He shudders and shrinks more deeply into his coat. He can’t think about this. He has to think about someone else. Or something else. Anything would be better than her.

Out in the streets, the lamps are turned low and there’s a sort of smog hovering over the cobblestones. Hardly weather to be outside in. But just as he’s deciding to hurry home, someone calls his name in a voice that’s been haunting his dreams. He shivers and prays, silently, that he’s only imagining things.

“You can’t fool me, Constable,” the voice says. “I know that’s you.”

He feels a light touch on his back. It’s her. It can be no one else. He jerks away and turns about-face to glare down at her. “Get away from me.”

She turns eyes wide with faux innocence up at him. “It’s good to see you again.” And then she lowers her eyelids and leans in as if she has a secret to share. “I haven’t been able to get you off my mind since the Feast.”

“Funny, I haven’t had that problem.”

Her mouth curls up in a smile. She knows he’s lying. She loops her arm through his and begins walking him down the street in the direction he’d already been walking. He has no grounds on which to protest. He could shove her to the ground and make a run for it, and maybe that’s what he should do, but with her this close it doesn’t seem like the right solution.

“What _were_ you doing in there, Stein?” she asks in a light voice. But it’s too flippant. Her grip on his arm is like steel. “Did you go to see anyone special?”

He tells her the truth. “I went to see anyone but you.”

“Did you, now?” She raises one eyebrow. “And how did that work out?”

Her voice drops by several pitches on the second question, changing from light ribbing to scorn. She’s jealous. Stein feels a smirk bare his teeth.

“Quite well,” he lies. “I’d almost forgotten what you look like.”

A cold smirk graces her face as well. It’s breathtaking. “That would have been a pity. I’ve just left the Lovelorns, you see, and I thought we might get to know each other as allies rather than rivals.”

She turns him down a street. They’re headed for his home, and where else could he claim to be headed at this hour?

“Are you hungry?” she asks, her voice light again.

His stomach gives a traitorous growl, and she smiles in a way that might have looked sweet in another context.

“Shall we dine together? I’d—”

“No,” he says before she can tell any more lies, and yanks his arm out of her grasp. The hunger is making it hard to think, is making his head buzz with the desire to pin this damned woman to the ground and tear at her until the secrets pulsing in her organs are exposed. But he knows he must not. And he knows he must not go anywhere with her. He does not need to want what he wants.

She doesn’t seem disturbed by his roughness. On the contrary, her smile only grows wider and wider. “Shall I cut the act?”

The question is moot; she already has. Her grin is that of a carnivore, and Stein remembers what her teeth felt like against his skin. He takes an unconscious step backwards and finds himself up against the wall of the alley. She doesn’t come any closer. She doesn’t need to.

Stein swallows. “I could arrest you.”

“You would chain me up?” she answers, and Stein’s stomach plunges as fragments of dreams spark across his vision. She is too comfortable in chains.

She gives a soft chuckle, because she knows what he’s thinking. She takes one step forward and tucks something into the pocket of his overcoat. “Here’s what I think,” she says. “I think you know better than to arrest me. I think you’re going to go home without telling anyone that we met. You’ll have something to eat, of course. Maybe make an effort to chat with your friends and pretend everything’s all right. But all you’ll be thinking of is that poem I just slipped into your pocket. You won’t be able to get your mind off it until you read it.”

She runs a finger down his chest. And that, finally, is too much, so he grasps her wrist with every intention to break it. But her sleeve sips back as he does and he sees a long, thick wound stretching up her forearm. It’s oozing pus at the edges, but that’s not what nauseates him. What turns his stomach is that he knows she did it herself and that he almost knows the reason. The understanding is somewhere in his mind, locked up for now, but someday he will know and someday he will be compelled to do the same. He releases her wrist and pushes her backwards. She only smiles and tugs the sleeve back into place.

“I do hope you enjoy the poem,” she says. “I wrote it just for you.”

“I’m not going to read it,” he snarls.

She stares at him for a long moment, as if waiting for something. Then she lets one last laugh trickle out of her and turns away.

*

A few mornings later, Stein sits in the station cafeteria and looks at his friends over a small mountain of plates.

“You two go ahead, I’ll catch up.”

Spirit and Marie eye the plates spread around him. “Are you gonna eat all that?” Spirit asks.

“Of course.” What a pointless question. The answer is obvious.

“The briefing…” Marie says, and he waves her concern away.

“I’ll be there. I just want a little more.” His stomach is gurgling emptily though he’s already cleared four heaping platefuls of food. Cafeteria food, at that. There was a time when he wouldn’t have touched the stuff. Now he can’t get enough of it. Food like this is nowhere near enough to satisfy him.

Marie and Spirit exchange a glance, but the urchin bobbing at the door clears hir throat and reluctantly Stein’s two friends trail away. “I’ll save you a seat,” Marie calls behind her. Stein barely hears it as he tucks in to the rest of his breakfast. He eats and eats until his throat is raw. It doesn’t make his stomach any fuller.

He’s just finishing the last plate and reaching something of an accord with his empty gut when the two return, and he looks up with a wan smile. “Sorry for the wait. Is it time for the meeting?”

“You missed the meeting,” Spirit answers flatly.

“…Oh.” Stein wipes his mouth on his sleeve, a crumbling shame in his chest. He hadn’t felt time pass. But there had been rather a lot of food spread out before him, and now there is none. “Anything interesting, or just Pages smashing words together?”

“The Widow’s up to something.”

Stein rolls his eyes. If that’s all he missed, there is no reason to condemn himself. “The Widow is always up to something.”

“Yeah, well, Stones want something done about this particular something. Took a break from whatever he’s been doing on the surface all this time just to come boss us around.” Spirit takes a seat next to Stein, and Marie joins him. She begins to stack the empty plates, a tight smile on her face.

“You’ve heard about the false-jade, haven’t you?”

Stein has heard. Someone’s been dumping enormous amounts of flawed stones into the economy recently. Rumor has it that it’s been smuggled in under the noses of the Masters. “That’s the Widow’s doing? Can’t say I’m surprised.”

“I don’t think anyone else. It sounds like she’s paying her agents in buckets of the stuff. They pick out the stones that are close enough to normal to fool exchangers at the Bazaar and pass the rest on to _their_ underlings. It’s like a reverse pyramid scheme.”

“And we know how the Masters feel about pyramids,” Spirit interjects.

Stein rolls his eyes. The Masters are needlessly petty about Egypt. “So? What are we supposed to do?”

“Apparently she’s getting another shipment by the end of this week. Mr Stones would like it kept out of her hands. And he put you in charge of the operation.”

Stein starts. “Me?”

“I guess you’ve impressed him.” Marie has finished stacking the plates, and she turns that tight smile to him again. There’s more tension in it than joy. “Or impressed someone, at least. Pages might’ve recommended you.”

Stein looks up at the ceiling. “And he didn’t rethink his idea even though I wasn’t there?”

He looks down again just in time to see Marie and Spirit exchange another glance. “We, um… told him you weren’t feeling well,” Marie explains. “But that you’ll definitely be better by the time the shipment comes in.”

“Any reason you’re determined to shoulder me with this job?” Stein asks, eyebrow raised.

“Look, Stein, everyone knows you’ve been out of it lately,” Spirit says. His voice is a bit harsh. “Get this done and no one will question you anymore.”

“No one’s questioning now—”

“Yeah, they are.”

He says it with certainty and finality. That shame from earlier eats at Stein’s heart again. He hasn’t noticed it. Sure, he’s heard the occasional whisper, but there are dozens of people to look askance upon in Ladybones Road alone. Do people have nothing better to gossip about, that they focus on him?

His eyes fall on the plates stacked around him. There are five stacks. At least five plates in each stack. It isn’t even ten a.m. yet, and he’s still hungry. He swallows hard and folds his hands behind his head to pretend to relax. “The docks, huh? Do we get any help from the neddy men?”

“Not unless Stones and Fires kiss and make up by the end of the week.”

Stein sighs in exasperation. _That_ isn’t likely; the feud between Mr Fires and Mr Stones is a long-standing one and has reached the point of open sabotage these days, though it interrupts the otherwise smooth flow of Bazaarine commerce. Stein wouldn’t be surprised if someone told him that Fires was involved in the Widow’s scheme. He’ll have to keep that in mind while he plans.

Deep in thought, he runs his hair through his short hair. It’s oily and unkempt. When did he bathe last? He’s a bit skittish around water these days because it carries over into his dreams as memories of drowning—some that are his and some that aren’t. He wakes up screaming and starving. It’s been hard to get any sleep at all, really, and to fill the empty hours of the night, he eats.

If he wants to keep his job—if he wants to keep even a modicum of respect from those around him—he has to pull himself together.

“Leave it to me,” he says. “I’ll figure something out.”

*

His investigation turns up none of the false-jade itself. Any fragments received by the Bazaar are swallowed up and forgotten. The two-faced fence on the special constables’ payroll claims she knows nothing and cannot be induced to say more. And the Widow’s agents, of course, avoid the special constables like bohemians avoid bad wine. By Friday, not one single fragment has fallen into the constables’ hands.

But information is almost as good. Within a few days, Stein knows enough to get by on: the smuggler is a rogue zee-captain. Ostensibly, he’s in the pay of the Traitor Empress; ostensibly, he sails around the zee collecting information and carrying out the empire’s trade. In reality, he goes far beyond the call of duty—for the sake of his own wallet. His smuggling operation reaches ports across the wide Unterzee and carries a wide variety of contraband. But for now, the false-jade is the only thing that interests the Masters.

Stein sits at his desk and considers all of this, munching away on whatever’s closest. He pores over shipping timetables and he plots. A plan is taking shape. He will not let this hunger turn him into a disappointment again.

*

And in the wee hours of the morning, when he really should have been sleeping to prepare for the mission, he realizes at long last what Medusa had been waiting for when he refused her poem. He should have thrown it away or torn it up or forced it back into her hands, if he had really had no intention of reading it. But by the time he has this thought, he’s got the paper unfolded and pressed flat against his desk and he’s undoing his fly with one hand. Her hand is elegant and meticulous. And he is an utter fool.

_You, dressed in the void, with your desires_

_hidden deep behind black nothingness in our eyes:_

_you will let me illuminate you, light_

_stripping away all your refusals. They are empty, and false._

_I am your favorite scent: silent, secret,_

_irresistible. The barest hint_

_and you can already taste me. Did you think_

_you could forget what it is to crave, to be weak_

_with hunger?_

_So we will consume each other, giving_

_our bodies up unto this starvation;_

_you will taste of iron, salt, and smoke,_

_and I of sour water, the kind to drown in._

_Alone, we will starve._

_Only come to me, my love,_

_and I will take of you—little by little—_

_until we are knit too closely together to part._

 


	4. Chapter 4

It’s a perfect day for smuggling: the fog is low and rolls in from the Unterzee with an oily sort of texture that clings to clothing and skin. Even the closest barge-light is faint and hazy in the greenish smog. Above, the false-stars offer feeble protection against the encroaching darkness. It will be hard to tell legitimate goods from contraband. Stein adjusts his collar. False-summer is on its way, and even though he’s dressed in civilian clothes rather than his uniform, he can feel sweat mixing with smog on his face. Or maybe that’s just a matter of nerves.

Still, his focus is absolute. He’s the closest he’s been to “not hungry” in a long time.

He knew he would need to be. Thanks to Spirit’s pointing it out, he has begun to notice the uneasy stares of his colleagues and superiors. Or maybe he has been imagining it, foreseeing omens of betrayal where they are not. In any case, he did not sleep last night, even after he put Medusa’s poem away; he only ate for hours, until he thought he was going to be sick. And just when he was finishing up the food he’d bought for himself, Spirit brought him more. Soon thereafter, Marie did the same. They must have had the same idea. So he dug in, and now the growling of his stomach is for once ignorable.

He hears shouting and a scuffle from where the offending ship is docked. Through a small telescope, he discovers that Marie has arrested the poor crewmember tasked with unloading the contraband, and other constables are swarming the cargo hold.

“How’s it going?” Spirit asks from beside him.

“Well.” Stein shuts the telescope and hands it to him. “You keep an eye out from here. I’ll go see if they need any help with the contraband.”

Because the point is for him to be in control of the mission: to oversee every aspect of it and make sure it goes well. He needs to micromanage so that the Masters and all of his colleagues can see that he is still perfectly capable. Even if the grumbling of his stomach is slowly growing more insistent. He won’t lose himself to the hunger when the Masters’ respect for him is on the line.

When he makes it to the dock, Marie is leaning on the edge of a cart as other constables begin hefting seized crates into it. She smiles at his approach.

“We’ve got this in the bag,” she says.

She is so confident that he’s almost able to smile back. When she offers him a bag of dried surface-fruit, though, he feels the other constables around them shift, some of them watching from the corners of their eyes and some of them looking pointedly away. He refuses the fruit, even though it makes his stomach gurgle in protest.

“Are you sure?” Marie asks, her eyes concerned.

“Yeah, I’m fine. Thanks for earlier, it was plenty.”

“Oh, good. I’m glad.”

Her easy belief of his lie is testament to the fact that Marie has never felt this hunger herself. There is no “plenty” when it comes to this feeling. Sometimes there is “enough”—enough to distract, enough to make it possible to focus on something else every now and then—but never plenty. He’s been hungry for so long that he honestly can’t remember what satisfaction feels like. Instead he knows only dissatisfaction, stretching on and on for ages, stretching out of him like a sad sickly thing reaching for the light. It’s always there, in the back of his mind, like the unblinking eye of a giant—

Stein swallows hard and forces his thoughts back on track. The smuggling. He is here to stop the smuggling of false-jade into the city.

He refocuses himself just in time; one of the constables plants a box at his feet and then salutes him, her face blankly respectful. “Sir, some of these aren’t labeled. Do you think they might be the ones Stones is after?”

“Could be.” He nods for her to crack it open. She’s right: slivers of glinting green stone fill the box to the brim, some of them flecked with red and black in unnatural patterns. If it had been real, it would have been worth a small fortune. But the strange coloring makes it unsaleable, and—something else. Looking at the stones, Stein feels uneasy, as if cold water has settled into the bottom of his lungs. But he makes himself shake the feeling off. If the false-jade is something unnatural, then that is the Masters’ domain to handle. Stones, jealous creature that he is, will take care of it.

They replace the lid of the opened crate and he gestures for a second cart to put these boxes in. “Keep an eye out for more like these,” he says to no one in particular, but he knows he will be obeyed. For the first time all week, he lets himself breathe a little easier. They’ve done it. They have succeeded. _He_ has succeeded. Stones will be grateful, and Pages will be forgiving, and the constables who have all been giving him a wide berth will begin to smile and joke with him again. He almost smiles with relief, until his vision of a calmer future is interrupted by the high-pitched voice of an urchin.

“Comin’ through! Comin’ through!”

A brat who barely reaches Stein’s waist comes careening down the dock. The constables scramble to get the contraband cargo out of the way, and they succeed—but a second urchin comes barreling after the first. “Get outter my way!” she yells, and this time the constables are not so lucky: she shoves past one man who’s in the midst of hoisting another unmarked crate into a cart. The crate spills out of his arms and into the zee. Gruff curses fill the air, and someone makes an attempt to grab the child and misses, and Stein isn’t taking in any of it because as soon as the first stones touch the water, something seizes in his chest as though a wild animal is clawing at his lungs and his vision goes black—

*

“THEY DROWNED HIM!”

Marie jumps in fright and nearly upsets the cart she’s trying to steady. Stein. That is Stein’s voice, but it sounds different and wrong. He’s bellowing at the top of his lungs about drowning, about betrayal, and his eyes are wide but unseeing. The other constables look at him in horror. So does every other living soul in the vicinity.

Her heart pounding, Marie reaches out to grab his arm. “Stein,” she says, her voice trembling, and then she says it again, shaking him, because she doesn’t know what else to say and it doesn’t seem like he heard her to begin with. She has to quiet him somehow or else this mission is doomed, and she has to quiet him because he’s suffering, because _something else_ has him and someone has to save him—

“No!” he snarls, and pulls his arm out of her grasp. He takes great heaving breaths and looks around at the people on the dock, bent over like a feral animal. And then, abruptly, he turns and throws himself into the zee.

A chorus of panicked “Sir!”s goes up around Marie, but she doesn’t hesitate: She dives into the black waters after him. The cold shocks her bones and tears at her eyes when she opens them. She doesn’t let that stop her. Stein thrashes in the Unterzee’s embrace; she feels it rather than sees it, and around him, clinging to him, she can feel tendrils of something without form. Words like _all wells bear the memory_ and _then let it be drowned and let it be drowned and all shall be well_ ooze against her mind. Rising from the depths, from the scattered glittering green of the spilled false-jade, a thousand mourning cries pierce her ears.

Then she has her arms around Stein’s body. He isn’t thrashing anymore—he’s gone limp—and the instant she has him in her grasp she feels the idea of tentacles reach for her too. Except they’re claws now, or teeth, scraping against her skull. _There will be a reckoning_ , a harsh voice says without sound, _we will make a reckoning. He and I… and you?_

And for a moment there are thoughts that aren’t her own in her head: despair, a bottomless rage, an obsession like the hunger of a rabid dog. But she clutches Stein closer and with all her heart she answers, _I WON’T LET YOU HAVE HIM!_ and she kicks back towards the surface and makes it through, safe. The air of the Neath rushes back into her lungs like a child that missed its mother.

Spirit’s come to the dock and pulls them both out of the water. “What the hell happened?!”

Marie shakes her head desperately because there are more important things to worry about first. Stein isn’t breathing. She lays him out on the dock and gets his shirt open and pumps the water out of his lungs until he coughs it out on his own. Only then does she breathe a sigh of relief and look around.

What she sees is no cause for relief. Pandemonium has broken out; all around her, her colleagues struggle against neddy men, a few of them already laid low by lightly fatal clubbings. She clambers to her feet. “Stop!” she cries with all the official resonance she can muster while soaking wet. “In the name of the Masters, as a special constable, I order you—”

“It’s no good,” Spirit says, holding her by the arm. “I don’t know if Fires is being pissy or what, but they aren’t listening. Worst case scenario, he was in on the smuggling op.”

“But Stones would have told us…”

Spirit can only shrug.

And then Stein sits up, clutching his head. His eyes trace the boards of the dock, and before he can focus on the zee again, Marie grabs his hand and holds it tightly. She’s never felt anyone shake this much.

“Stein?”

His eyes don’t seem to be able to focus on her. “I’m hungry,” he rasps. She takes out the dried fruit—not very dry anymore—and offers it to him. He only shakes his head. “No, it—I need, need fl—all their teeth, do you remember? Like insects…”

She squeezes his hand more tightly—all she can do. “Stein,” she says, her voice wavering, “you should eat something. You need to—”

To purge his mind of the obsession that the poet reawakened, to forget about the search and the name and to eat until the unnatural hunger is finally satisfied. But she, too, felt the touch of forgotten things in the water and with a chill in her stomach, she knows—once touched, there is no forgetting them.

He still refuses the fruit. But now he casts his gaze around them, half-blindly. “The mission,” he says, “did we—the—the false-j-j-j—”

His mouth keeps working, but no sound comes out, and his eyes have gone far away again. Finally he pulls in a wheezing breath and Marie feels his muscles tense, but she still doesn’t expect the way he shoves her away.

“Hey!” Spirit yells in her stead as she sprawls backwards against the dock. He tackles Stein before he can get any further, and a good thing, too, because Stein’s limbs are all seizing like he’s possessed, and he’s started shouting again, and it’s worse now because Marie knows the timbre that rolls underneath it; it’s the same timbre that called to her, calls to her—

“Marie!” Spirit shouts. “Handcuffs!”

For a second, she wants to protest. They don’t need to. They can’t, not to a friend. But she can fool herself for no longer than that, and with a wretched heart she takes them out. She holds down one of Stein’s thrashing wrists; Spirit takes the other; and together they arrest him in the name of the Masters of the Bazaar.

*

A short distance away, Medusa slips into an alley and lets her hair tumble down from the newsboy cap she’d stuffed it under. Pressing the cap against her mouth, she stifles her laughter, but her mirth leaves her leaning against the wall anyway. They’re going to arrest him. They are going to chain him. It’s more perfect than she can imagine.

“Hello ma’am.”

She looks up. One of the urchin girls from earlier is peering down from a nearby roof, a shrewd look on her face.

“Can I help you?”

“Yes’m. Only you didn’t mention that this was of such concern to the Masters. We didn’t realize.”

She gives a calm, superficial smile. “Do you require something more?” She’d paid them well for the chaos earlier, but she has the resources to pay more, and if they need protection then she can bargain with the Widow. The Widow will be pleased, after all: Fires and his neddy men will reclaim the stained jade, and none of it will go to Stones.

The urchin only drops down to the ground and sticks out a grubby hand. “Three times what you paid,” she says.

“A hard bargain,” Medusa answers, and she hands over the coins. Before she can pull her own hand back, the urchin slaps something into it. She knows what it is before she sees it because of the scream that tears through her heart and her head. The stained jade.

“An’ listen,” the urchin says, “I don’t want none a’ this. Don’t you ever get us involved in something with this again, you hear? Not ever.”

“Noted,” the poet replies with a smile. “I don’t think I’ll need your services again, anyway.” She’s had enough of the city, and the way that everyone looks at her.

The urchin begins to leave, but then turns back. “The one exception is if’n—if’n you wants to get rid of your wind-brand, I can—”

Medusa clutches the fragment of stained jade so tightly that it cuts into her palm. “I don’t think I’ll need your services again,” she repeats, very clearly.

The urchin bobs her head and scrambles out of sight. Once she’s gone, Medusa breathes a sigh of relief and opens her hand. Shifting the stained jade to her other hand, she idly laps the blood off her palm. It probably isn’t sanitary, considering the origin of this particular strain of jade, but she isn’t concerned. If she falls ill, she has the cider in her back cupboard. And certainly it can’t damage her own soul. That’s as bad as it gets already.

The stained jade itself is unsettling to hold. She knew Stein would react; she thinks she did, too, the first time she came across a sliver of it. She can’t remember very well. But she can never leave anything connected to the Search well enough alone, so she soon found herself in the Widow’s dark room, bargaining for a chance to be involved in the smuggling.

“You will control yourself?” The Widow’s icy voice floated out of the blackness.

“I will,” Medusa had promised. She is utterly capable of self-control. For almost a century she has controlled herself, steering herself away from the Search, until—until of her own free will she took it up again. A simple matter.

The Widow, as old as she is, knows that a Seeker cannot be dissuaded. And the cider, Medusa’s most prized possession after the candles, makes a superb bargaining chip. She hired Medusa to run interference, and when Medusa heard that Stein would be heading up Stones’ half of the battle, she had laughed to herself. How easy it would be, she thought, to distract someone already so corrupt.

She hadn’t guessed that Stein’s own friends would put him in chains at the ends of it; that is a happy accident. She wonders how many times he has been betrayed now.

But that is a matter to look into later. For now, she holds in her hand a sharp-edged fragment of stone. An uneven green gem flecked with blood red and muddy brown. Once it was a part of someone’s soul; now, holding it in her palm, Medusa wonders if they miss it. If they regret what they did to themselves. Are they still alive, or has age or illness or any of the infinite dangers of the Neath claimed them? The stained jade has no answer for her, save for the same mind-rending scream that they all make.

Beyond her safe alleyway, the ruckus on the docks is beginning to die down. It is time for her to return home and plan: it’s all well and good for Stein to be chained, briefly, but just as a Seeker’s soul must be regained each time it is lost, to let him rot in New Newgate for too long will foil rather than fulfill what he needs. She tucks her hair up under her cap again and checks in a nearby window that her face is still too grimy to be recognized. Then, as if on a casual walk, she strolls out of the alley, past the few remaining scuffles between neddy man and constable. She pays them no mind, like a true Londoner.

When no one is looking, she tips the fragment of stained jade out of her pocket and into the zee. The scream in her head reaches a fever pitch as it begins to drown, and she listens until it falls silent.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Brief mention of vomit in this one.

New Newgate is usually filled with raucous sounds—friendships being forged, fights breaking out, occasionally the two at once. But for now, it is quiet as the masked prisoners in their dirty rags wait for their supper. Muttering breaks out somewhere in the line, every now and then, until a warden swaggers up and glares at the offender. They’ve ignored Stein so far. He hasn’t had anything to say, or anyone to talk to.

Yesterday, he had talked. Shrieked, really. He can’t remember the words and can’t remember anything visual, just a wretched sense of betrayal like the howling of the wind and yet, at the same time, a rabid satisfaction. He remembers Marie and Spirit with their hands on his wrists and then his hands behind his back. Horror on their faces that overpowered regret. Maybe he laughed. Maybe he told them _you’ve done it now, oh, you’ve done it now, oh, now you’ve done it_ as they turned him over to the constables—ordinary constables, stupid corruptible lowlifes who usually took orders from him. He bit one of them. Took a good chunk out of her arm and then licked the blood from his lips. That was when they’d hit him on the head. In his next moment of awareness, he was on a dirigible, and soon they deposited him at New Newgate.

And here he is, waiting to be fed, because there is no other option but to wait in this place. His stomach feels as though it is trying to eat itself from the inside out.

He dreamed of chains. They’re heavier here than the ones in the Mutton Island jail, or maybe they just feel that way because of their finality. _Now you’ve done it_ , he said to his friends, his betraying friends. Five times as a child and now and the dream of the poet makes seven, and seven is the number, and oh, they’ve done it now. He’s marked again, as he marked himself with death so many years ago.

He should be more afraid than he is.

Instead he’s only hungry, and desperate to escape.

*

The muttering in the line grows more frequent, the wardens’ attempts to quiet it more frantic. A message is being passed from the front of the line, no matter how many times the warden shouts, “Silence!” Finally the sullen voices are close enough for Stein to catch some of what is being said.

“Didn’t the supply dirigible come?”

“Didn’t see one, but I gots an inside room, so that don’t mean much.”

“It could be something else.”

“If they had summat to eat, they’d bring it out.”

A warden stepped forward for that person, club in hand. “You wanna go without dinner, love?”

“You ain’t got dinner to begin with.” The speaker is thin as bones, with long, dirty hair that reaches their mid-back. It may have been white before their interment at New Newgate, or a pale straw color; it’s difficult to tell. Below their black mask, their mouth is a sneer. As they speak, their voice gets louder and louder. “If’n you do then why don’t you bring it to us?”

“That’s it, outta line!” The warden wrestles them to the ground and drags them away, and the rest of the prisoners fill their space in line like a nervous jelly. But it takes a nudge between Stein’s shoulder blades for him to move forward. Is there no food? Would there be no food today?

“Starvation day,” mutters the prisoner in front of him, resigned and sour, and his stomach roars its emptiness and something inside him snaps. He whirls to face the nearest warden.

“Do you think you can do this?!”

The prisoners around him take an alarmed step back, isolating him, and the warden makes as if to tackle him. But he dodges that and kicks the woman in the stomach and doesn’t stop kicking. “I need to eat! Do you have any idea how hungry I am?! Do you know—”

She makes an attempt to grab him by the leg that sends him off-balance for a moment. Not long enough to make a difference. He shakes his leg free and stomps on her hand, feeling her bones crunch. She screams. The rest of the wardens are coming now, and some of the other prisoners make their own attempts to grab him. They’re all traitors, self-servers, meat with hearts made of tattered rags. Soon there are too many of them, and for all his twisting and flailing and biting he can’t get free, and his animalistic screams are silenced when someone clobbers him on the head once more.

*

So now they put him in a deeper cell and wrap him in heavier chains. As if that will make a difference. When he comes to, his hunger is so enormous that he can’t even muster the energy to be angry. He begs instead.

“Please,” he says, reaching one arm through the bars as a guard passes. His head is swimming, and only the chains and bars that define his captivity feel solid. When he catches a bit of the guard’s shirt, it slips out of his fingers like water. “I’m so hungry. I need to eat. Please.”

The guard looks back from behind his mask, but doesn’t respond. He marches on and leaves Stein behind, and Stein slides down to the floor weakly. He can hear the prisoners in the other cells muttering about him, but he can’t make out the words and he wouldn’t have the energy to stop them if he could.

Evening, or what passes for it in the Neath, comes. A warden wanders through the cell corridors and extinguishes the candles and raps on the bars of each cell he passes, declaring curfew. Slowly, the conversations around Stein cease as the prisoners fall asleep. But he stays awake, staring at nothing, picking at his chains with a dull light in his eyes. He can’t quite remember which of his memories are his and which belong to someone else. In time, he knows, the distinction won’t matter. That is, if the hunger doesn’t put an end to him first.

Time passes; the guard changes. Stein is shaken from his stupor by the shuffling sound of something landing by his feet. Focusing his eyes, he sees that it’s a packet of dried mushrooms. With a shriek of excitement, he pounces on it, almost downing the paper along with the mushrooms in his haste. “Thank you,” he says through a full mouth, “thank you—”

But the words fade on his lips as his eyes travel up the warden’s body—is she a warden, or is she just disguised like one? The mask over her face doesn’t hide the twists of her blonde hair, and nothing could conceal the way she smiles.

“It’s a pity you’re not the Snuffer,” she remarks in an undertone, “or you could eat a few of these candles and be done with it, hm?”

He shudders, because his mind is already reshaping the words and making them mean something else. He wants to stumble backwards, away from her. But there’s another packet of mushrooms dangling from her fingertips, and his stomach is still growling. He swipes at the packet through the bars like a kitten after a piece of string, and she moves the prize out of reach and grasps his wrist instead.

“Well, now. I do like a man of his word, and isn’t this what you promised me? From a certain perspective, you are indeed seeing me behind bars.”

She lifts his fingertips to her lips and nibbles on them, and he screams in rage. _Like insects._

“Shhh,” she whispers, kissing where her teeth had been. “Do you want me to be caught? I can’t help you if I’m caught, you know.”

“I have no need for anything you’d call help,” he snarls.

“No? Then I guess you won’t need these.”

She works the flap of the second packet open with one hand and tips its contents to the ground. Stein cries out and tries to kneel, tries to retrieve them, but she’s still holding his wrist and before he can free himself she has ground the mushrooms to dust under her heel. His stomach turns in disappointment. She lifts her foot and delicately brushes dust from the bottom of her shoe.

Stein makes another attempt to pull his arm back, prying at her grip, but her fingers are as strong as the chains and she only slams his fingers against the steel bars. “Shh,” she says again when he makes a choked sound of pain. “See, you do want my help after all, don’t you?”

“Bitch,” he snarls, but the word turns into a gasp when she tosses a third paper parcel onto the floor of his cell. When he lunges for it, she releases his wrist at last.

“Enjoy,” she says, her voice musical and growing fainter. He doesn’t realize until after he’s devoured the mushrooms that she has disappeared.

*

He does notice, however, the other two items in the packet. The first is a tiny snake, not much longer than his finger, which winds down around his hand with the first handful of mushrooms that he lifts to his mouth. Lucky for the snake, really, because if he hadn’t spotted it, it would have gone into his mouth with the rest of the packet’s contents. The bones crunching between his teeth would have given him pause—well, maybe. Maybe not. (Had the bones given _them_ pause, or had they sucked them dry and grinned and grinned and—)

The other item is less consumable: a small round mirror, the sort used for putting on makeup. Here, in the middle of the night, there’s no real light to catch on its surface. And yet when Stein isn’t looking closely, he thinks he sees—something impossible. Distant, brief flashes of green and amber. When he looks straight at it, though, only his own ragged eyes stare back at him.

The serpent tries to burrow first into his palm, and then the ragged clothing that the wardens had given to him. Failing both, it turns its head towards Stein indignantly. He shakes it to the floor.

“Don’t look at me,” he mutters. “I never wanted you here.”

Without further comment—or, indeed, any comment at all—the serpent slithers off into a corner and disappears among the shadows. Stein’s stomach growls and then sinks. He considers, with a bit more purpose, what it would be like to crush the tiny thing between his teeth or even swallow it whole and feel it wriggle down into his stomach. Perhaps it would be satisfying. Perhaps. But it is such a tiny thing, and anyway, he can’t see it now. He sets the mirror aside and huddles into his cot, hoping that sleep will come for him before the mushrooms have worn off.

*

Over the next few days, the snake makes intermittent appearances in his cell, most often when he returns from meals. Stein has to assign a certain amount of prescience to it: somehow, it knows to make itself scarce when he’s starving. More than once, Stein finds himself turning the narrow cell upside-down in a desperate search for the snake, or anything else to eat. But on those occasions, the snake is nowhere to be found—though there is no possible hiding place within the cell. So he is condemned to his own thoughts until the next time they deign to take him out of his cell and feed him.

The other prisoners don’ talk to him. They talk _about_ him sometimes, usually calling him “that hungry guy,” but with the savage way he eats and the pathetic way he begs for food from every guard that passes, he can hardly blame them for not making nice. He has no intention of reaching out, either. That would only end in betrayal.

So, mostly, he lies on his cot and condemns himself. He is still desperate for the Name, but in his captivity he can do little besides dream of chains and a guttural voice calling him North. Sometimes he wakes to find himself grasping through the bars of his cell, trying to squeeze himself through a space far too narrow; sometimes he wakes to find teeth marks imprinted on his fingers and a scrap of skin on his teeth. Sometimes he doesn’t dare to sleep at all. Mostly, he is not able to resist it, any more than he can fight the nightmares once he is asleep.

One night, he wakes in a helpless daze, hunger pounding in his head and stealing all the strength from his limbs. He can only stare at the ceiling, at the twisting pattern of emerald light there as if reflected off a tiny pool of water—

There is no water in here.

Stein makes himself sit up and looks around for the source of the light. Outside his cell, the candles remain unlit; even if there were water in here, there would be no light for it to catch. He looks instead to the floor—

And sees the hand-mirror the poet left for him lying there. Its surface ripples like a pond, tingeing the air with rays of green and amber light. As Stein watches, hypnotized, the snake slithers across his floor and through the surface of the mirror like it’s the simplest thing in the world. The green-gold light begins to fade. But Stein’s hand darts out; he picks up the mirror and peers into it. He should know, he thinks, what all of this means. Where the light has come from and where the snake has gone to. He can’t pull it to mind, though, and then—

*

—There is a swelling of vertigo and then he is on his feet in a jungle, green pressing in on his eyelids. His mind curls around the specific name of the shade: viric. Around him, the very air he breathes is damp and swelling with life. The cries of a bird or of a dozen birds fill his ears. Behind the leaves, there are inorganic shapes, mirrors squirming with scenes from elsewhere.

Over the sound of the birds and the cries of a panther he hears a roaring in his ears. It is saying _North, North, North_ , and that is where he is headed. He aches with emptiness. He begins to move forward: northward.

*

The light above him outshines any lamp. He remembers things he can’t possibly remember: hot white light, stinging the skin unlike home-darkness. And rage at the light, at its folly, its demands, its impassivity. _If the sun is its master, then let the sun be drowned. Let it drown let it drown let it—_

He comes across a burbling stream of water and plunges his arms into it without conscious thought. Snarling, he flings handfuls of water up into the sky, at the amber light above. But it doesn’t reach and this isn’t the real one and there’s something in the water that burns his arms. He makes a choked gasp, falling to his knees. And then, before he feels better, he hears something rustling in the brush. A flower with lurid violet petals trembles, and a wave of too-sweet scent washes over him. Not safe here. He moves on.

*

North. It is the only clear thought he has, clearer than clear, like light focused through a lens into a single point. Time passes indistinctly as one foot falls in front of the other.

A panther, deep black, snarls into his path. Its fur is matted and falling out in places, and its ribs are sticking out. Its eyes glow a vivid yellow.

Stein hesitates, not sure whether to run.

“You can’t get where you’re going from here,” the cat says. Its voice sounds like mud strained through weeds. Stein’s stomach turns.

“You don’t know where I’m going,” he says, his throat dry.

It continues as if he hasn’t spoken. “You’ll never get there with a soul that clean. You’ll get nowhere with a soul that clean. You’ll just keep starving and wandering.” It raises a paw and bares razor-sharp claws. “I can help you with that.”

His chest twinges with something he tries to avoid knowing, and the panther’s gold eyes pull him forward—

—but the panther howls, suddenly, screams with indignation as a shape launches out of the bushes. Stein freezes. Something coils around the panther, too thick and cruel to be a vine—a snake—

With a swipe of its paw, the panther bats the snake off its body and bolts away through the bushes. There is a sound like shattering glass. The snake lies on the ground with deep gashes in its body. It writhes. Then it is still.

*

Something’s moving, just ahead of him. He follows it for a long time (is it a long time?) before he realizes that that’s what he’s doing, chasing after an indistinct rustling and the occasional twitch of a fern. There’s nothing else to guide him, after all. The amber light above him seems paralyzed in the sky, without a shift to show him east or west. So he has followed after this moving presence.

He realizes it when he stops to pull a piece of low-hanging fruit off a branch in front of him—a plum? A nectarine? He doesn’t stop to identify it before sinking his teeth into it, and when the flavor spreads over his tongue it tastes like neither of those things. It’s mercilessly bitter and too sweet all at once. He retches and is sick. In the heat of the jungle, the smell of his own vomit makes him reel, but while he’s trying to regain his balance, something rustles again and his eye falls on the culprit: a snake.

Is it his snake, the one the poet left for him? It isn’t the right size—this one is much bigger—but he can’t shake the feeling. It waits as he wipes his mouth on his sleeve. And when he is ready to walk on, the snake goes before him. It, at least, seems to have a purpose. And if it’s from her (and it must be from her), is not her purpose the same as his?

After he has that thought, it is impossible to keep from following. So he doesn’t question when the snake leads him to a mirror with a plain brass frame, doesn’t question when it slips through the face of the mirror without a sound. And he doesn’t hesitate for a moment before walking towards the mirror and pushing through.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's an instance of complete non-consent in this one.

He feels a sound of shattering: doesn’t hear it exactly, nor does he feel the shards of glass that leave scrapes along his skin. But he knows that something has shattered, and the jungle is behind him now. The sounds of the birds, the warmth of the un-sun, the cloying scent of fruit beginning to rot are all fading. Only one sound remains: a hissing that he suddenly realizes he has been hearing for hours now. It’s louder now, more solid. The snake is still before him.

Around the snake is a small room, lit only by candles. The sour scent of tallow is in the air, and the shadows—so many of them, so gray and dull—dance as the flame wavers. He watches the snake slither away from him. The feeling in the pit of his stomach—hunger and fear and a burning eagerness all twisted together—already knows who it is leading him to.

It comes to a pair of bare feet and winds up the legs attached to them. Stein’s eyes follow it up her body until it settles around her throat. Then he looks to her smile.

“You came,” the poet says in simple happiness.

His own lips try to form a smile but he’s forgotten how. He still knows how to laugh—but is that a laugh, the sound that escapes him? It doesn’t sound exactly right.

The poet raises her arm, offers her hand. He lurches forward, hearing the shards of the mirror crunch beneath his boots. But then he remembers that he isn’t wearing boots, that he wasn’t wearing them in prison. His feet are bare. Along with the realization comes the pain, and he stumbles as not only his feet but also his arms and his face begin to burn where they are cut. The poet rushes forward to catch him. He shudders, his head coming to rest against her shoulder.

“Hush,” she says. “All shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well. We are the inheritors and the protectors of that promise.”

She cradles his cheek and tips a single drop of something onto his tongue. He swallows instinctively. The taste is sweet, some kind of fruit—peach? Apple?—mixed with secrets and age.

As he breathes in, the pain recedes.

He straightens, takes a step back. He can’t thank her. He must not thank her; nothing she’s ever done deserves gratitude when it’s all meant to drag him down into—hell would be a mercy. Hell would be better than here, in her power.

But he has a hard time believing that now, and his lower lip trembles with the need to say _something_.

Again, she stretches out her hand to him. “Come,” she says seriously. “Eat.”

And then anything else she could have said is irrelevant, because of that word: because the cider hasn’t taken away his hunger and for a moment he’s lightheaded with need. She takes his hand and pulls him forward, to a table piled with fresh fruit and meat still dripping with juices.

She bids him to sit, and he does, but not before he has a plum in one hand. When he bites into it, the flavor bursts over his tongue and he moans in appreciation. With three quick bites, he finishes off the rest of it, the juices staining his fingers. He makes himself spit the pit back out in a strange moment of propriety. He doesn’t need the pit. He needs _flesh_.

And the poet knows. She is already pulling together a plate for him, steaks piled high and peaches and apples sprinkled around them. She takes nothing for herself. When the plate is full, she sits down, gripping the edge of her chair tightly, her eyes flitting from him to the food and back again. She’s breathing heavily, but she’s controlling herself. And for a moment, Stein thinks of doing the same—but only for a moment before a strange sound creeps out between his gritted teeth and he brings the steak to his mouth and sinks his teeth into it. The juices spill out over his lips and down his filthy clothes. He is devouring, devouring, always ravenous for more and has been for centuries and will be for centuries more—he catches his breath and tries to shake away the thoughts that aren’t his. The feeling of raw meat between his teeth is so enormously familiar, and the iron tang of blood filling his nostrils recalls memories from another time. Not his memories. He can remember them anyway.

He could cry. He feels like he could fill himself on the taste alone of the meat and the flavors of the fruit that are so deep they nearly have color. If he could stop eating for just a moment he would ask Medusa where she found such things down here; even on Mutton Island with their allshallbewell water they can’t produce anything like this. But when he gags on a moment of bitterness, he knows the answer: they are from the flash of green behind his eyelids, from the unplace he just traveled through. The one she led him through, he realizes with a shudder and a choke. He should care. He should scream at her or run from her or shoot her and then hack her to pieces so that even the boatman can’t send her back and no tomb-colonists’ bandages could hold her together. He can’t. Not when all this food is spread out before him, not when he might be able to fill himself for once. She has him, he acknowledges, and his fear is too distant to stop him. It’s certainly not stronger than the hunger. Nothing is.

She stands, circles behind him. He’s tongue-deep in another enormous steak and so barely notices until he feels her teeth sink into the back of his neck. And then _rage_ , a flash of betrayal that turns the meat sour in his mouth. He leaps to his feet and shoves her away even as she laughs. At him. She knows why he is angry and she knows that the anger isn’t enough to keep him from needing to eat. Does she think that he will spare _her_? He throws her down onto the table, among the feast she set up for him, and then tears at her dress, gnaws down her neck, scrapes his teeth over the sigils carved into her skin. She gives a high, drawn-out gasp. The nails of one hand dig into his shoulder and push him downward. She has to know that he isn’t full yet.

And so he moves down her body until his eyes are only inches from the sigils on her legs. They would burn into his brain if there were anything left there to destroy. Instead they only add to the chaos, his mind reshaping them to mean _a hunger, quenched_ and _the ecstasy of eating_ and _carrion’s supper_. He can smell her now, musty and sour with need. His stomach growls, and with a clawed hand she forces him closer.

She shudders when he presses his mouth to her gash. He runs his tongue over her folds, lapping up her musk desperately, moaning as it slides down his throat to his aching stomach. She’s murmuring something inhuman over the top of his head, something that drives his mind even further from him. He wants, _needs_ to consume her. And so when she begins to buck, he clamps her legs in his hands. A moan, and then among her babbling he hears a sound that means _indelible chains_.

It isn’t long before she comes, gasping and arching and yanking his head back by the hair. Her breaths all have a high note to them like those of a medium in a trance. But his own are ragged, too, and his thoughts have no meaning. He only needs. Hunger has tied itself in knots around lust in his stomach again—it always does, when it’s her—and he’s uncomfortably hard. Medusa takes up a knife—he hadn’t noticed it on the table, hadn’t needed it—and slices his pants open. It doesn’t matter that she nicks his legs in the process.

He climbs onto the table and presses into her in a single movement and feels himself swallowed as if by deep waters. The sensation envelops more than just his member; for a moment he is drowning again, gasping for air and filling himself with nothing but water, because he can’t escape this feeling. Will he die again like this? She is the betrayer, the chains, the well, and all his rage can do is draw him closer to her to be consumed. She has her nails dug into his back so that he can’t escape, and he moves in and out of her with all the desperation of a man trying to keep his head above the waves.

*

When they calm, when the room begins to fade. A murmur in his ear—at times parched, at times rich enough to feel slick and fatty on his tongue—

_Taste the heady nectar of their sin;_

_it is become ours when the flavor_

_spreads across our tongues. We must repent._

_Mortify the flesh, submit to the chains,_

_debase the soul, and yet hunger still:_

_For all must be well, and all_

_shall be well._

_No longer let us drown in tears._

_Where betrayal has made its home, a_

_maggot in a rotting cavern of flesh,_

_let us nestle together and keep each_

_other warm. Let us swallow the wax_

_that spills from us, let us consume;_

_let_

_us_

_be_

_consumed._

*

When he sleeps, he dreams. Of thunderous distant voices rumbling in his bones, screams of rage and betrayal. Of rotting water filling his mouththroatlungs. Something whirls in his chest like a baffled compass and when it settles it tugs, it pulls him, he knows whither. North. _North_ , but the muddied water swirls about his legs and drags him downwards. There is always deeper water to swallow him, time and time over, for hours and years. Something wrings out his stomach, something calls him; his eyes crack open and he thinks he sees the poet’s lips upon him once more like every tale of succubi ever told. Her eyes flick towards his and they are not her eyes; they are green as foxfire and brimming with desperate hunger. He cannot move. She turns her gaze downwards once more and swallows him again and again until finally, with a long groan, he gives up his seed. Does she sob with gratitude as she laps it up? Or is the sound his? He sinks again before he can tell, back down into the deep lightless black water. There is always deeper water to swallow him. Nightmares like these ones last for decades.

*

He wakes, some time later. It cannot possibly be as much later as it feels, but time has passed and his mind is clear. Still seen through hazy water, still held in place by the seven chains he will never shake off, but clearer than it has been since the trap that Medusa set for him at the docks. He knows it was her. It could be no other.

He’s still sprawled out on the table among broken dishes. Around him, the smell of the feast she laid out for him lingers, but now there’s an edge of decay to it. When he sits up, he sees a strange sheen on the meat and deep bruises on the fruit. When he brushes his hand against a peach, it turns to mush.

His stomach gives a distant rumble and then turns with horror. How long before he is driven to eat even these rancid offerings?

For now, he sniffs at a pitcher on the table and, discovering it to contain water, pours its contents over his limbs to begin washing them. He could search out a restroom, but there is no guarantee he would find that before Medusa finds him, and if he’s going to confront her again—and naked, at that—he prefers to do so in a clean state.

His skin is sticky with fruit stains. They don’t seem to scrub off.

Once he’s as clean as he will get, the temptation to lie back down is strong. He can rest his mind and body a little more, make it easier to fight off whatever spell the poet has cast on him. Or maybe it’s the Neath itself that has Stein in its thrall. A thought crosses his mind and pulls a grin to his lips after it. _There’s something in the water down here…_

“What’s so funny?” a cool voice asks in a moment, and Medusa slides into view. She’s wearing simple clothes—a sleeveless black top and loose-fitting pants. She looks at ease in a way that Stein hasn’t been for weeks.

She asked what was so funny. Ah, because he is laughing. He shakes his head and takes a deep breath to stop the wild sound. “It’s nothing.”

“I see. Did you sleep well?”

“How long did I sleep?”

“Only one day. Nothing terribly out of the ordinary. You seemed so settled that I didn’t want to move you.”

He gestures to the piles of food around him. “And this?”

“I thought you might want some when you awoke,” the poet says with a shrug.

His stomach gives another growl, but he makes himself focus on the sick smell of the meat. If he looked closely, he probably would have been able to see mold beginning to grow.

But that doesn’t seem to bother Medusa. She comes forward and picks out a string of grapes, though they’re overripe to bursting. She plucks them off the stem with her mouth, one by one, curling her tongue around each first. Stein stares. Remembers her lips around his cock. It had felt as distant as a dream, but he’s certain it had been real. He hadn’t been chained down as she’d devoured him then.

“Would you like some?” Medusa asks, raising an eyebrow. He twitches before he realizes—the grapes, she means the grapes. It hardly matters, because she gives him no chance to answer; she snakes one hand around the back of his neck and brings his lips to hers and passes one of the grapes into his mouth. His teeth come down on it automatically, releasing its sweet juice over his tongue, and he groans in unthinking pleasure. It feels cool and perfect going down his throat. And then, as soon as it reaches his stomach, the hunger is on him again.

He shudders and curls up, arms clutched tight around his abdomen. “No…” he moans softly. Medusa runs the fingers of one hand over his hair gently, soothingly. With the other, she holds a pear to his lips. The sweet scent of it seems to burn him, and his mouth moves on its own, tearing chunks out of the fruit and swallowing them whole. It feels incredible to fill his mouth with it. Grunts of pleasure interlace with helpless whines.

“All shall be well,” she encourages him. “Here is the safest place for you. In London, the Masters would condemn you. On the islands or at zee you would drive yourself to madness and self-destruction. Here, with me, we can protect each other. Feed each other.”

He mishears for a second, thinks that she said _Feed on each other_. It would be equally accurate.

He swallow the last of the pear and laps up the juices from her fingers without a thought until she makes a small appreciative noise. It makes him shiver, makes him _want_ —but it brings him back into himself a bit.

“What do you want with me?” he asks. His voice is hoarse as if he’s been screaming in his sleep.

She shrugs, rests her spit-stained fingers in his lap. “Companionship. I’ve driven away my friends, my allies. All to be expected, of course, but… One does get lonely, especially with such a consuming task as ours is.”

“Yes,” his mouth agrees automatically. And then, “My friends…”

“The ones who left you to rot in New Newgate?” Medusa’s voice is icy and sarcastic.

In New Newgate, among the petty criminals and the less-petty criminals. They left him there, forgot about him, and Medusa was the one to come for him. But this is no salvation.

“My friends,” he repeats, more firmly.

She shrugs. “Suit yourself. What about them?”

He falters. What about them? Does he want to be near them, want to trouble them? Want to feel their wary gazes on his back as he tries desperately to fill his need? They’d put him in prison because they couldn’t help him. With a deep sigh, he lets his shoulders sag. Medusa is there to gather him into her arms.

“Yes,” she murmurs, “you do see. It’s better to be here—better that we are here for each other. There’s no need to trouble your friends any longer.”

Yes, he had troubled them. They had at least tried to save him—tried to tear him away from this path to damnation, tried to rehabilitate him with the Masters. And how had he repaid them? He’d botched the mission because of this compulsion. Of course they’d had to put him away, after that. And if he cannot escape the hunger, the kindest thing he can do for them is stay far away until even their concern dissolves into the past.

Medusa runs her hands over the wounds that litter his torso, counting them. Seven. “I see you’re scarred,” she says quietly. “And chained, too?”

He swallows, his throat suddenly dry.

“Are you stained?” she asks.

His lips tremble and he tries to push her away. “I want—I want to get dressed,” he says. “I want to put some clothes on.”

“I have a shirt and pants of your size,” she says. “The ones from New Newgate weren’t salvageable.”

“Where—”

She takes his left hand. Her touch is like ice. “Stein,” she says firmly. “You know you must be stained.”

He knows it, yes; he has known for years. But the thought of destroying his own soul in that way makes him sick. It’s the one step of the inevitable process that he has fought with all his might. “I want to get dressed,” he says again, but her grip is stronger than his and he can’t pull away.

“As ruined as you already are, would you balk at this and abandon the Search?” Medusa presses. “All the sacrifices you’ve already made, would you bring them to naught?”

He shudders. It isn’t a matter of whether he _would_. He can’t escape the Search. It already has its hold in his mind.

“When you’re ready,” she says, “I can help you.” And she leads him to her closet and lets him dress, and then lunch is ready.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: depersonalization/derealization in this one thanks to abstraction.

Days pass. She feeds him well, always on fruit and meat from the place behind the mirrors. He thinks of asking her where the meat is from, what kind of unholy animal’s flank it is made out of—but as if she knows his question, she always finds a way to distract him when it occurs to him. Not always with sex, though that continues to serve as an answer to their hunger. Sometimes all she needs to do is take him by the hand and breathe a reminder of what comes next. With each reminder, he feels horror crumble into resignation.

And then one morning, the last of his horror is gone and he wakes with the understanding that today, inevitably, is the day. He finds himself staring out the window as if his mind were capable of forming thoughts of escape. Outside, the swamp breathes and roils like a living thing. He sees fungus-colonies shambling along slowly in the distance and wonders what it would be like to be consumed by one. To let it creep up and around his body until he could see nothing, until he was breathing in the slime. What would it feel like when it began to digest him? Like insects crawling up his skin? Or like a liquid flame?

He remembers what it is like to be consumed.

He hears footsteps behind him, but doesn’t turn. He only begins to shake. The poet’s hand passes over his shoulder and tugs the curtain closed. Her other hand creeps around his waist. Her lips brush the nape of his neck.

“Are you ready?” she murmurs.

His stomach tightens with the knowledge of what he will let her do. He knows that he will let her, knows that he cannot resist for long when he is so close to burying himself in the number, but he still asks one final time: “Do I have to?”

“Yes.”

She answers seriously and simply. There is no denying her confidence, and when she pulls him away from the window, he doesn’t fight it. She kisses him first, smoothes his hair. Like she’s comforting him. Then she takes his hands in hers and leads him to her bedroom. It’s a simple one, nothing like her residence in the city. A small, square mattress and tattered sheets. On the nightstand is a cup of pearly liquid: laudanum.

She bids him to sit and offers him the cup. He stares into it rather than drinking. “I thought—” In his paranoia, he has picked up some knowledge of abstraction. “I didn’t think there was laudanum involved.”

She pauses, still holding the cup aloft. “I’m not a devil,” she says, a faint note of self-deprecation to her voice. “You may find it… comforting.”

He smiles, his lips trembling. “As though I would need comfort once I’m without a soul.”

“I recommend it,” she says.

He pushes the cup away. He doesn’t want to cloud his mind for this. He thinks he should understand.

With a shrug, Medusa sets the laudanum back on the nightstand and gently pushes him down onto the bed by the shoulders. To have her leaning over him is familiar, and he feels his member stir in his pants.

“Shh…” she breathes. With the back of one hand, she strokes the side of his face. In the other, she’s holding something that catches the light between her fingers. He can hear her murmuring, but the light in her hand has his attention and her voice comes to him as though through deep water. He’s not making out her words anymore.

The light shines fluidly above his mouth for a second, and then he feels something being pulled out of him slowly and reluctantly, like a long sigh. It hurts. Does abstraction hurt? It is the feeling of a sore throat except multiplied throughout his body, in his arms and his stomach and his chest. Something tears, and he flinches. For a moment, the poet’s words have meaning again.

“—the laudanum?”

He shakes his head heavily. Then there is another tearing sensation, this time in his chest, and he cries out. Medusa presses a hand onto his chest to still him and continues her task as the rest of his body jerks. Time creeps by.

And then, he feels nothing.

The hunger is still inside him, of course, but the rage, the horror—all of that has faded away like a nightmare. When Medusa’s hand slides down his body, he observes the pleasure it gives him as though from a distance, or through a clouded glass. He stares up at the ceiling, hardly seeing it, hardly anything on his mind.

Medusa passes over him. Her lips cover his and press for a time—how long? It doesn’t matter. It is easier to breathe once she withdraws.

“I’ll tell you when it’s ready,” she says. Her hand rests upon his brow. “You will want time to recover before it goes back in.”

“Must it?”

He wonders what it would be like to remain this way. Would it be altogether bad? Now, he knows he is hungry and he knows he must seek the name but the fear that usually burdens the knowledge is gone. Perhaps being without a soul has its advantages.

But the poet says, “You know how main stains you must bear.”

He closes his eyes. Yes, of course he knows. Seven the number of chains, seven the number of scars. In his dreams he counts the flames of distant candles, and he can never quite reach the total, but he knows that seven is the number.

He can stay like this, though. Eyes closed, body at rest on this bed. Medusa will toy with him; Medusa will bring him food when it pleases her to and he will devour it because the hunger is never gone, but the urgency doesn’t control his mind anymore. “I’ll rest,” he says.

“Yes.”

She touches her lips to his forehead, then again to his lips, and then she is gone.

*

A day later, she hasn’t convinced the cat to actually eat the soul yet. It hisses every time she comes near, swiping its claws at her between the bars of the too-small cage. All of these starveling cats are known for their foul temperaments, and this one, she supposes, has reason to be even angrier after her serpent chased it out of Parabola.

But soon it will be too hungry to be petty, and soon it will devour Stein’s soul because she’s giving it nothing else to eat, and then a few hours after that the soul, somewhat lesser then, will be ready to be put back in with the first of seven stains upon it.

That, in any case, is a matter for later. For now, Medusa has a more immediate concern: the presence of one of Stein’s Special Constable friends, picking her way through the marshes and drawing ever closer to Medusa’s hut. The mirrors that she has set across the swamp catch the constable’s form and reflect glimpses of her to Medusa’s own mirror, flecked with viric and cosmogone. Medusa doesn’t know the woman’s name, but she was at the docks. She is one of the friends who gave Stein his last memory of chains.

And now, she is looking for him.

Medusa considers her with a wary sort of boredom. She’s nothing but walking tallow, this woman. She underestimates the search; no doubt she thinks she can make Stein listen to reason, or that forgetting the need for the Name is as simple as turning one’s mind in other directions. She will need to be taught otherwise, and with a firm enough hand that the lesson will not be forgotten. So Medusa takes up her stone knife—the one with which she has spilled her own blood many times over, the one that feels both nostalgic and repulsive in her hand. With practiced ease, she slips into what she thinks of as her corner of Parabola. It is an easy matter from there to find which mirror the constable is closest to now, to wait until her back is turned, to leap out and drive the knife into her side. The constable screams—useless, because there’s no one around to hear—and tries to get her gun out, but Medusa’s attack was too strong for that. She wavers before she can draw her weapon. When she crumples to the ground, Medusa catches her, and then it’s a short trip back through the mirrors to the cot in Medusa’s home. Here, she will die and wake again. When she returns, Medusa will make it very clear that she is not to come chasing after Stein again.

*

Marie wakes with a start, her side aching and the wily leer of the boatman lingering behind her eyelids. She groans and sits up, trying to remember what killed her. She had been looking for Stein after hearing that he’d disappeared from prison… had gotten an address out of the Lovelorns…

It’s then that she realizes she’s not at home. Blinking first down at the thin blanket clutched in her hands and then at the stained gray walls around her, she tries to orient herself. She doesn’t know this room. In the corner, a gas lamp set on a nightstand puts out a feeble, unconvincing light. There’s a chair by the nightstand’s side, empty for now. On second look, what she first took for water stains on the walls may instead be a dripping kind of fungus. She suppresses a shudder and pushes the thin blanket (it’s lined with moth-holes) aside. True, in the Neath a room of this quality is not necessarily malevolent, and it seems that she has been nursed back to health while she drifted down the slow river. But she is still uneasy.

And, she realizes as her stomach gurgles—she is hungry.

She has been ever since she threw herself into the waves after Stein. It’s a niggling, persistent feeling that never quite goes away, and if she doesn’t eat enough before bed she has nightmares. She doesn’t try to interpret them. She knows better than that. She had vaguely hoped, in her last few moments of consciousness before the blood loss killed her, that when she woke her stomach would be satisfied. But no, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

She squeezes her one good eye shut and shakes her head. That’s something to worry about later, anyway. Now she has to figure out where she is, where Stein is, how she can bring him home. She had been stabbed on her way to Medusa’s hideout, probably by Medusa herself, which means that this won’t be easy—

The door creaks, and she opens her eye to look. The snake-keeping poet is standing over her. Without a word, she offers Marie… a piece of fruit?

“What—” The word comes out a little garbled, and Marie clears her throat. “What is that?”

“A plum,” the poet answers, not lowering her arm.

“What’s in it?”

She shrugs. “Plum-flesh. Juice. A pit.”

There’s a sardonic edge to her voice, and the curve of her eyebrows is amused, but not without cruelty. Seeing Marie’s suspicions, she raises the plum to her own lips and takes a bit. Its juices dribble down her chin in a way that turns Marie’s stomach. She makes a show of swallowing what she bit off.

“There isn’t any poison, since that’s what you meant to ask.” She offers the plum to Marie once more. “Take it. You’re hungry, aren’t you? Since that day at the docks.”

Marie suddenly feels cold. “How do you know that?”

Medusa gives another shrug. “I could answer that,” she says in a way that sounds like a threat. “I could guess what the water said to you. I could tell you just enough that you need to know more. If you already feel the hunger, it won’t take much more of a push.”

Marie’s heart begins to pound, and as discreetly as she can she reaches for her pistol. But it isn’t there, and anyway Medusa’s gaze followed her hand, and she still just looks amused.

“I won’t, though. I think you’ll find it better for both of us if you forget all the whispers of the Search that are beginning to drift through your mind. Which is why you should take this.” She holds up the plum once more. Rivulets of juice catch the light and outline the shape of Medusa’s teeth. “If you aren’t going to eat it, I will.”

At that, Marie’s hand reaches out on its own and she snatches the plum from the poet’s grasp. The taste, when she bites into it, is incredible: as bright as sunlight and even sweeter than surface-fruit. She’s never eaten anything this delicious in the Neath, not even at the Masters’ banquets, and she makes short work of it, disposing of the pit into a handkerchief. The demands of her stomach are now somewhat sated. Only then does she realize something odd about what Medusa said. She raises her head. “Better for ‘both of us’ if I forget?” she repeats. “Who is both of us?”

“You and I,” Medusa says.

“What about Stein?”

The poet doesn’t try to deny that Stein is there, in her clutches. “Probably best for him, too. Do you think he would want to see you fall into the Search? Do you think he wants to see you at all, when he is this deeply damned by it?”

“If he doesn’t want to see me, I want to hear that from his own lips,” Marie says hotly.

Medusa gazes back, and Marie flushes under her impassive stare. Silence hangs in the air for a few moments until Medusa deigns to break it.

“You will find that you already have your answer,” she says, and points to Marie’s side where her wound still aches lowly.

Marie pats at the wound with one hand, first through her shirt; then, with a strange feeling in her chest, she lifts her shirt to confirm what she thought she felt. The wound has been neatly stitched up. She runs her fingertips over the fibers, thinking of the stitches across Stein’s face, her heart pounding once more.

“You did this,” she accuses, her trembling voice turning the statement into a question.

“No,” Medusa answers with obvious scorn. “Stein did it while you were still dead, without an ounce of emotion, and now that you’re alive, he hasn’t been waiting in here for you. He doesn’t care to come see you. Like I said, you have your answer. And if you have any sense, you will take it to heart, leave, and not come back.” She begins to turn away.

“Wait!” Marie’s hunger is lessened and her head is clearing. She doesn’t quite believe what Medusa is saying, but it’s irrelevant anyway. “You _killed_ me.”

“Only briefly,” Medusa answers, sounding bored.

“I ought to arrest you.”

A simpering laugh. “Out here? How do you propose you’d get me back to London, exactly?”

She’s right; they’re so far from the city that Marie’s authority as a Special Constable is meaningless. But she refuses to follow Medusa’s so-called advice.

“I want to see Stein,” she says. “Whatever you’ve done to enchant him, you had no right to do it. Let him decide what he wants to do, unless you’re _afraid_ of what might happen.”

With any luck, seeing her will bring Stein to his senses. They may be able to subdue the poet and bring her in if they work together. And once she has Stein back in London, she can help him clear his head.

Medusa gives her a long stare. Then, moving quickly, she gathers Marie’s hair in her hand and gives it a good yank, forcing Marie to look her straight in the eye. Her grip is too tight to escape, and Marie’s head swims. She isn’t well yet.

“All right,” Medusa says in a dangerous voice. “I’ll bring Stein in here, and then in front of him I’ll explain why you’re going to leave and exactly what will happen if you do not, and you’ll see what he thinks of that.”

She releases Marie’s hair and turns away sharply. Before she can escape out the door, Marie says in a raised voice, “I care for Stein _far_ more than I fear you.”

A mirthless laugh drifts over Medusa’s shoulder. “We’ll see if that lasts,” she says, and shuts the door behind her.

*

“Stein, come here.”

Medusa’s voice is brusque. Lacking anything better to do, he stands to follow her. He has already adjusted to the feeling of being without a soul. It’s a little boring, but boredom doesn’t really bother him. Nothing does. He eats when his stomach demands he does, which is most of the time. What does he fill the rest of his time with? He can’t remember, nor can he care. The apathy is almost a soothing contrast to the consuming desperation of the Search—almost, because he can’t feel particularly soothed, either. He just remembers that before, he was unhappy, and now, he is not that or anything else.

Medusa strokes his cheek, which he feels only distantly. “Marie wants to see you,” she says. Her voice is icy and her eyes bore into his.

He stares back, puzzled by the determination in her gaze. “I guess I’ll see her, then,” he says. He might as well. He isn’t angry that she betrayed him anymore, so now seems as good a time as any. He wonders if the stitches took. He wonders if, in another state, he would hope that the stitches took, or something even stronger than hope. It doesn’t really matter, though.

As if satisfied by something, Medusa gives a nod and turns to lead him to the opposite end of her little hovel. Marie is sitting on the cot there, gripping its edge and staring intently at the door. When she sees Stein, her face transforms—first with confusion, then with realization and… is that horror?

“Stein?” she says, her voice trembling. “What has she done to you?”

Medusa’s arm loops around his waist and pulls him close. Faintly, he can feel the warmth of her body. “Stein is among the eleven percent,” she says, her voice pleased. And then, “Do they still say it that way?”

The percentage hasn’t been eleven in decades—it’s closer now to twenty. Theories abound as to why more people choose to give up their souls, but Stein hasn’t kept track of the details. Also, Marie is shaking her head slowly back and forth.

“No,” she says, but she isn’t answering Medusa’s question. Is she talking to herself? There’s no point in denying what is so obvious, after all. She stands and reaches hesitantly for Stein. “Why? Did _she_ do this to you, Stein?”

“Yes,” Stein answers matter-of-factly to her second question, and then to her first, “It’s part of the Search.”

She shakes her head again. “You don’t need to search,” she says. “You don’t need—the name.”

“I do.” He’s long past the point when not needing it was an option. He isn’t desperate, now, but the need is just as present. “I don’t have to be afraid when I’m like this.”

Marie’s eye wells up with tears. “No, Stein, you _should_ be afraid of it. You were before, remember?”

Yes, he remembers the fear and the shame and the lurking sense of doom. What a miserable existence. This is better. He knows, conceptually, that it won’t last, but for now it is better. And only now matters.

“Come with me,” she pleads. “I can help you get free of this. Like you helped me, before. I’ll find some way.”

She reaches out her hand, but Medusa tightens her grasp on his waist. “Stein is not going with you.”

Marie’s face sets and for the first time since Stein entered the room she looks straight at Medusa. “I’m not leaving without him,” she says, her voice hard. “Body _and_ soul.”

It’s difficult, suddenly, for Stein to breathe. No, he only wants it to be. Or—no, he only thinks that it should be. He should be feeling something about the determined glint in Marie’s eye. Shame, gratitude, affection? What did they feel like, again? Medusa is no guidance; standing at his side, she wears only scorn on her face.

“If you try it,” she says simply, “I will kill you and desecrate your corpse so thoroughly that not even the greatest surgeon in the Neath could make you fit for the most wretched tomb-colony.”

Marie answers with a grim smile. “I’m a Special Constable, you know. Don’t underestimate me.”

“You’re the one underestimating _me,_ child.” Medusa raises her voice, and her eyes shine in a way that Stein finds rather curious. “I fell with London, and London has been my home for a century. I have journeyed to the far reaches of the Unterzee. I have eaten the fruits of the garden and made bargains with the Fingerkings in the land beyond the mirrors. You have no hope of challenging me.”

It’s impressive. Stein hadn’t known that she was that old. But Marie seems afraid rather than impressed; she wavers for a moment, and when she speaks again her voice trembles. “If Stein and I both—”

“Stein won’t help you,” Medusa interrupts.

“How can you be so sure?”

How, indeed. Stein considers it for a moment. Dying does not terrify him too greatly. And dying would mean that he wouldn’t have to put his soul back in again and then take it out, and in and out and—

Medusa interrupts his train of thought with a hand on his cheek. He lets her turn his head so that he is staring down into her eyes. Her gaze burns like fire. She speaks to Marie, but she doesn’t let him look away. “He won’t help you, because if he does, I will _not_ kill you.”

The threat in her voice is so clear that even Stein feels a tiny shiver of fear.

“Instead,” she continues, “we’ll keep you here. We’ll use your plump little legs for supper, perhaps, if I tire of hunting in Parabola. And we will starve you until you, too, are on the brink of Seeking. And when Stein is drowning in the urge to plant the Search in another’s mind… when nightmares like marsh water pour out of his mouth…” A smile curls the corners of her lips. “Well. You betrayed him, didn’t you? So it would only be fair.”

Stein tries to turn his head to look at Marie. There is a feeling almost surfacing in his mind, and if he can just see Marie’s face, it will give him a clue whether the feeling is a good one or a bad one—but Medusa grasps his chin and her eyes are as deep and dark as the zee. “Frankly, you might find it convenient,” she says in a whisper, this time to him. She still sounds like she’s making a threat; her voice has an edge of hatred to it. “Maybe you should try it.”

Stein’s lips tremble. He knows, now, what kind of feeling this is: it is a bad one. Marie should not be treated that way. _He_ should not treat her that way. He should not want to, and he doesn’t want to, even if it would be convenient, even if Medusa’s eyes are glinting in a way that is close to a command. He will not inflict that on Marie. Isn’t that the right choice? And what would he be feeling if he had his soul right now? He can’t tell for sure, but with a surprising vividness, he wishes he could.

“Marie.”

His voice comes out with an almost dreamy quality. He hears Marie gasp, sees Medusa narrow her eyes.

“You should go.”

“Stein…!”

“I’ll stay here. But you need to leave.” Medusa is right, anyway. They belong together, two Seekers to keep each other company on the road to damnation. Probably he will want company again once he is re-ensouled, once his ruined soul is lodged in his chest where it belongs. He doesn’t think he needs it now, but he remembers in the form of simple fact that loneliness is a miserable feeling.

Medusa stares into his eyes, then gives a low chuckle and wraps her arm around the back of his neck to pull him into a kiss. It lasts for a long time, and he has a strange feeling that he is being treated like a trophy rather than a human. Finally, she breaks the kiss and turns her head towards Marie. “You heard him,” she says. “In any case, he won’t fight with you. Still want to take me on?”

He looks over at Marie. She’s crying. That’s too bad. It should be more than just too bad, but he can’t manage more than that. He’s shaking. His heart feels empty.

“Go,” he says in that dreamy voice again. “Go home to London.” London is her home. He thinks it probably isn’t his anymore. His home lies in the North, and he’s been trying for so long to get home.

“I’ll come back,” she says, her voice strained.

“Don’t,” Stein and Medusa say together. Stein wonders what she is feeling as she says it. The nothingness that he feels seems insufficient.

Marie doesn’t say anything more. Medusa pulls Stein away from the door so that she can leave. Then she is gone.

His head spins for hours afterwards, and his heart pulses like a phantom limb.

*

_Some time later_

“That’s seven,” the poet says quietly. “It is done.”

Stein is still shaking. He is ensouled once more, one final time, and it hurts more now than it ever has before. He stopped refusing the laudanum after the second time, but even so the pain of having his ragged soul ripped out will live in his bones for longer than he does.

“If I have less of my soul now—” he says in a trembling voice, trying not to think of the stained jade fragments and how they screamed and how his own soul must look like a tattered rag. “If there’s less of it, shouldn’t it hurt less?”

“It does,” Medusa promises. “Eventually.”

His lungs sting as if cut with glass, but when she strokes a hand down his chest, the relief of being able to feel her touch again is a momentary distraction. Her lips pressed against his are another moment forgotten. “See,” she murmurs into his ear, “it’s better to be together.”

He shivers with the pleasure of sensation. And then her hand crawls down his body, and he hungers.


End file.
